Something In Nothing - Compelling?

Baba Yaga illustrated by Dmitri Mitrokhin

I am beginning to get feedback from readers of my new collection, Something In Nothing, and it's fascinating and a bit surprising.

"Compelling" and "Couldn't put it down" are not words I would normally expect in a response to a poetry collection. Describing a novel, yes. But then Something In Nothing weaves the lives of a number of characters as their lives cross and interact to create a narrative. It is arguably a novel made of poems.

People seem to want to learn about the characters and what will happen to them. One reviewer said when she had finished reading the collection, she found herself rereading the Baba Yaga poems as a sequence. I was delighted by this, as my first attempt at writing the sequence, I envisioned it as an ebook, with html links allowing readers to do just that.

Baba Yaga seems to have attracted a lot of attention. I'm not sure why that is, maybe it is because this complex and fascinating character is little known in the UK. Bluebeard also has his fascination. Why is it that we are so fascinated by the dark side? That is a question at the heart of the collection.