Sing Me Down from the Dark

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, author of Sing me down from the dark (Salt, 2022), taught in Japan for 10 years. Currently, she delivers workshops for The Poetry Business and The Poetry School, and she presented on the zuihitsu form at the 2024 Japan Writers Conference. Alexandra is published in The North, PN Review, Magma, The Moth, Poetry Wales, and Anthropocene, and has been shortlisted for The Fish, Troubadour, Winchester, and Artemesia prizes. She has master’s degrees in Japanese and in Writing Poetry.

t would be a mistake to read these poems as simply some form of confessional autobiography, this is so much more – there is a depth and honesty in the descriptions of behaviours and emotions which speaks far beyond the personal, immersing the reader in the complex and intimate confusions that are at the core of relationships. This is a collection which uses a well-crafted variety of forms, from Ghazal to prose poem, exposing the raw edges of social and cultural expectations of women within marriage and wider social settings.