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
