The Day of the Flying Ants

The Day of the Flying Ants is about leaving homes and looking for new ones, the way the places we spend time shape the people we become, and the way that places and people are inextricable in our memories.

Emily Blewitt says: Emily Cotterill’s voice is sharply lucid, illuminating the fairground, abandoned factories, mines, hedgerows and beaches of her native Alfreton and adopted South Wales in technicolour. These poems are political, environmental, and unfailingly vivid; here Northern soul meets Welsh hiraeth. Cotterill’s askance look at the world both moves and entertains the reader. She is one to watch.

Rhian Edwards says: Emily Cotterill is an exciting new voice, spiky, neo punk in her hard-edged reminisces of her upbringing in the Midlands, from Derbyshire  pubs, teenage wet kisses and nervous hands to gypsy pregnancies, to her present anchorage in Wales. Her Alfreton idiolect and Shane Meadowsian observations sing from the pages.