Jen Feroze, 'Tiny Bright Thorns' from Nine Pens Press
Tiny Bright Thorns is Jen Feroze’s debut pamphlet, published by Nine Pens Press. The twenty two poems explore motherhood, love and connection, and reflect on the hopefulness of young children.
The poems vary in form through conversational stanzas to shape poems, to more traditional couplets, with a number after poets and artists. Feroze expertly translates the overwhelm of the unknown of the first post partum months, addressing, calling for, and forming a community of new mothers, with recognition and the offering of solidarity.
‘The Fourth Trimester’ speaks to exhausted new parents, highlighting the universe connection of being suddenly submerged into the unknown,
These first weeks are uncharted and you are adrift…… but you are swimming.
And then there are shallows, there are footholds.
using sustained metaphor through the narrative and a lullabying cadence.
‘When, At Bedtime, I Ask My Daughter What She Wants To Be When She Grows Up, And She Says ‘A Fox’’ is full of encouragement to a child to live outside of practicalities, and parents to embrace the world though a different lens. The repetition, used in the three ‘At Bedtime’ poems,
instead…
instead....
instead…
a visceral reminder. This theme of upholding childhood misbeliefs and encouraging curiosity and wonder, the task of shaping the balance of which realities we let in, and which we don’t, and how and when we should, is an undercurrent throughout the pamphlet.
‘Don’t Buy Her Flowers’ addresses the powerless magnitude of new parenthood, the long flowing sentences turning instructive in the last stanza. These poems about the confusion, exhaustion and new position of self, as a mother, are generous in their imagery and intent.
‘Tiny Bright Thorns’ is an exposure of early days motherhood, a magical song of the natural world - so much joy and wonder, so much uncertainty in the constant letting go. In the last poem ‘When The World Ends’, Feroze’s line
taste them deliberately with my mind
is a fitting synopsis of this delicate nest of small-scale wonder, and the protest act of loving unselfconsciously.
Feroze’s first collection 'A Dress With Deep Pockets' won the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition by the Poetry Business, and will be published by Smith|Doorstop in Spring 2025.
