ISBN: 978-1-915108-41-8
Published 26 May 2026
84 pages
“Poor old rickety, broken-biscuit Britain, with its tottering institutions, buy-to-let landlords, bad food and buried dreams. What does it mean to try and make a life here, a life with meaning? Lydia Unsworth navigates this cramped, compromised territory and tells us everything about work, non-work, relationships, family, buildings, the body, the everyday and its everyday betrayals. Clever and sharp, This Now Extends to My Daughter is a vindication of the role of the artist, a reassertion of the importance of a bright pair of eyes to tell us how it is, how it should be and how it feels.” —Tom Jenks
*
I See Patterns (emotional dysregulation)
My dad quit grammar school because he liked Benny Hill.
He quit me because I often used words with three syllables.
I’d rub my eyes until the perceivable world went yellow
and pink, with junctions, grid systems, arteries, synapses.
Time travel. Dream sequence.
In the parallel universe, the body feels familiar, but we
have a sense of being more awake than previously.
The colours are brighter. There is a special quality
to the instant before each new movement.
I have tried so hard not to be the same.
Perhaps that very trying forms a glut of attention, becomes
itself coagulant.
I hold my son’s hand, massively, in the playground.
The same teeth, the same crow’s feet, the same desire to
walk for a long time down the side of a motorway, the same
misunderstandings around rejection and absolute closeness.
The same corners are getting broken.
I am lit up with inherited sameness. It is blinding.
Here’s one more way my children could quit me, how I might
quit my children.
As is the pattern of my life, I have only had a little stroke. Just
dabbled with it.
*
“Part battle-cry, part cri de coeur, this whip-smart collection explores how we live day to day with, or in spite of, the legacies of systems, institutions and other people. Fierce, frank and funny, Unsworth’s open-hearted poems wake us up and break our hearts. This is how it is, they seem to say. All the slog, and all the beauty. An extraordinary collection.” —Rachel Curzon
“I love these poems! Lydia is one of the funniest poets I know, even as her sardonic speakers break my heart repeatedly. This book is about money, how capitalism shapes and fucks everything – it’s a municipal document of dailiness and all its collapsed timelines. How to return to the place you grew up and encounter your childhood again as a mother with children in tow? These poems take place in suburban community, watching TV, on public transport, at the swimming pool, at various interviews and jobs, in the hospital, at the supermarket. The gut-wrenching clarity of Unsworth’s speakers means you’ve got to laugh, looking around to acknowledge in bewilderment that, yes, ‘this might be my life’.” —Jazmine Linklater
“In This Now Extends to My Daughter, Lydia Unsworth declassifies class and accounts for decades of political and economic poor accounting. Britain’s poetic subjects chorus the day-to-day, day on day, clear-voiced and resilient.” —Kimberly Campanello
This Now Extends to My Daughter by Lydia Unsworth
* * *
there are many of usthe too-poor-to-be-separated
living like this
on couches
in the bedrooms of our children
*
Agency
three women sit opposite me
or two women and one manthey make me feel safe
talk to me about my impeccable eye contactsometimes they send me the questions beforehand
and frame that as an act of kindnessbut still they are doing it
I respond to the signs they give
I hear when they like somethingthey take information from you
where you heard about the job
how their brand is perceived
but when you ask which tell-all book
about publishing they’ve just finished
they won’t return the favour at allin four interviews now, people have said
aw
I can reduce a person to tears
but I cannot pack a box
with books especially not over
the Christmas period
when I have two children and cannot be on callone prospective employer kept ringing me
kept on phoning to arrange this interview
for a zero-hour contractif the client cancels less than 24 hours in advance
we will pay you, or, if you are already on your way
before that, we may consider itin the interview they asked why I wanted to work
for them rather than for their competitors
who I hadn’t researchedI said you called me
they asked why I had a gap
in my employment history
could I explain it
I said I was looking for workobviously
the job centre bring my appointment forward
without warning
stick it on a SaturdayI must always be available
they say
we’ll be in touch and no
you cannot sit down and can you
wait while I take this call?in the job centre you cannot be late
and you cannot
be early there are many chairs
though this is not a waiting area
and you cannot sit downI say you’ve got ten minutes
my six-year-old says she will buy my house from me
alright
or maybe her husband will
I ask her what she means by that
and she says maybe she will earn
most of the money and her husband
will earn just a bit but that she might
need that bit to buy the house and so
they will have to share
some thingsI tell her to make sure she has a thing
she loves outside of that person
which no one can ever take away
and that she can use that thing to express
herself whenever and however she feels like
but to study something elseI tell her the safety provided by money
is one of the most important safeties in this world
we have allowed be builtI tell her to make sure he cleans the bathroom
for her because she has already expressed
her desire for that
and I didn’t want her to forget about itin the job interviews
they keep telling me how interesting I am
and then not wanting methey say first I’ll ask two questions
then she’ll ask three
and this will help you know
who to look at
then they say why should we want you
what can you bring to the table
here’s your chance to shine, and so onthey say why should we choose you
over the other candidates
I say if you show me
who they are I can tell youit wasn’t my fault, I told my daughter, defensively
my father doesn’t speak to anyone
I say there’s a lesson here about stubbornness
anger, and a correlative lack of friends or familyand to me it’s obvious
how everything I know is obviousI know how to help people, to be helped, to ask for help
of course, it’s obviouswhy do you want to work here?
because you had a vacancy
it looked like you needed something
Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent collections include Stay Awhile (Knives Forks and Spoons), Arthropod (Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers) and Mortar (Osmosis). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Aftershock, Ambit, Anthropocene, Banshee, Berlin Lit, Blackbox Manifold, B O D Y, Oxford Poetry, Perverse, and Shearsman Magazine. She is currently a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture.
