Sweet Anaesthetist

Jay Whittaker grew up in Devon and Nottingham, and has lived and worked in Edinburgh for over 20 years. She has written poetry for much of her adult life. Her pamphlet “Pearl” was published in 2005 (Selkirk Lapwing Press) and more recently her poems have been published in Envoi, Brittle Star, The Frogmore Papers, Orbis, and The Interpreter’s House. She was shortlisted for a Scottish New Writers 2016 Award and the 2016 Bridport Poetry Prize. One of Edinburgh’s Other Writers, Jay enjoys making the most of the city’s literary and spoken word scene. (www.jaywhittaker.uk)

"Mingling disarming directness and imagistic restraint, Jay Whittaker's poems expand outwards from deceptively diminutive proportions—little bombs-for-the-soul of love, grief, anger and empathy. What occurs in or inhabits the peripheries of day-to-day life—from used contact lenses and garden birds to overseas military interventions—is brought centre stage in writing which powerfully demonstrates the urgency of alertness to things often cast off as disposable, or passed by unheeded. 'Have some respect. Look,' the landscape demands in 'Eyrie'. At once generous and unflinching in its vision, Sweet Anaesthetist tasks the reader to look more closely, and more flexibly, too—to lose, or at least loosen their grip on, 'the phrasebook / for the language of home'." — Miriam Gamble