Say

Sarala Estruch is a writer of mixed European and Indian heritage. Her poetry, creative non-fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including amberflora, harana poetry, Wasafiri, The Poetry Review, and The Guardian, and her work has been featured on BBC Radio 3.A winner of the Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primers competition, her work has also been short- and long-listed for numerous prizes, including the National Poetry Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Sarala is also an editor and critic, and a member of the Ledbury Poetry Critics. Say is her début pamphlet.

"Sarala Estruch’s extraordinary debut flows from the question posed by Audre Lorde: 'What do you need to say?' From these engrossing, wise, surprising poems, we learn about the poet’s struggle to 'coax words from hiding', but also about need: the need to speak, the need to hold back, the need for closeness - whether across the threshold of the page, or across the gulf of death. Say is the work of a spellbinding storyteller, who pieces together a cloth shot through with silences: old griefs, family secrets, the blindspots around race and colonial history from which our culture still turns away. 'Still, I’m not brave enough to ask', the poet regrets of her younger self. These poems shine with that bravery: I will come back to them again and again." -- Sarah Howe; "Sarala Estruch's Say grieves, is grief, gives grief its echo. Here a father is not lost but binds the daughter in an intricate web of mourning for home, language, belonging as well as love. The poems make uncanny crystalisations in a transformative image, a rhythm, a fragment, swelling with empathy. The poet speaks with two voices, wishes them into one, and what is said fractures language in its frame." -- Sandeep Parmar