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At times gut wrenching, at times ecstatic and defiant, Look How Alive I Am is filled with vibrant poems, pulsing with the joy and the pain of living. Navigating love and loss, battles with depression, Alpine landscapes and buzzing cityscapes, Hollingsworth-Smith’s debut book has a heartbeat.Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith’s debut collection is an inquisitive and tender examination of the minefields of coming of age. Here the body is a site of conflict and reconciliation. We are gifted with honest testimonies that microscopically examine sexuality, sensuality, crushes, first love and mental health. Hollingsworth-Smith’s scathing, yet refreshingly honest poetics brutally expose the impact of society’s gender violence on the body. The poems evoke a haunting, where the body endures and navigates imperfections and vulnerabilities. Where a scathing woman resides within the poet’s body and her caustic voice is a gripping melody that traps. Yet there is innocence here alongside reckless adventure, with stunning imagery where the caustic inner ghost is continually purged. These are poems of witness and resilience. Poems whose gripping melody bruises and beguiles. - Malika BookerArresting, wise and honest, Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith’s debut collection evokes what it is to come of age now. The speaker emerges from mental illness, isolation and complicated first romantic encounters with the determination to live and love herself wildly: ’The Wolf is coming out. She’s coming, look! She’s coming!’ - Helen BowellLauren Hollingsworth-Smith is a poet and artist based in Rotherham and Oxford, currently living in the French Alps. She is a member of The Writing Squad and Hive’s Poetry Collective. Lauren’s work has been published in several anthologies including She Will Soar (Pan Macmillan 2020). Her debut pamphlet Ugly Bird won the 2020 New Poets Prize. She won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year award in 2019 and was highly commended in the Young Northern Writers’ award. Lauren has performed at various events and festivals, including Ledbury Poetry Festival, Kendal Poetry Festival and Off the Shelf Festival of Words. She studies English and French at Oxford University
