Author(s): Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Poetry | 2023 Folio Prize short list

'In Quiet, Victoria Adukwei Bulley advances a poetics of balance. The poems collected in these pages mix a technically assured, sonically resonant, surface with a profoundly evocative, scrupulously integrated core. This book is a seismic event; its vibrations will be felt for a long time to come.' Kayo ChingonyiVictoria Adukwei Bulley's debut collection, Quiet, circles around ideas of black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, playing at the the tensions between the impulse to guard one's 'inner life' and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, 'your silence will not protect you'. The poems teem with grace and dignity, are artful in their shapes, sharp in their intelligence, and possessing of a good ear, finely attuned to the sonics that fascinate and motivate the writing 'at the lower end of sound'.