In her biography Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig is described as an editor, a translator and a writer of flash fiction, reviews and essays, but if her debut pamphlet, kinscapes (Dreich, 2022), is anything to go by, she is also an intelligent and innovative poet who playfully pushes the boundaries of poetic form, with telling effect.

kinscapes as the title suggests is about togetherness and connection. Life is presented as both a shared experience and an experience to be shared. Take, for example, Matthews-Schlinzig’s highly personal prose-poem describing a miscarriage. Significantly, the tragic event is told in the plural first-person, ‘we’. The woman, who has lost the baby does not separate her feelings from those of her partner, neither when describing their shared joy at conception, nor when conveying the complex mixture of feelings at the moment of loss: ‘there we were,/ lying on the bedroom floor, the weight of disbelief/…