Sylvanian Family

Reading Summer Young is like folding yourself into a deceptively miniature world, a cat's eye view of a dystopian Wonderland. Here, shoe prints are rabbit snares, a mother is a mountain, the trellis-like family home encompasses a complex ecosystem of cockroaches and fireflies, mice and sea urchins. In this arresting debut, Young invokes the visceral candor of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and confronts trauma with a fierce and virtuosic wit.

Like any good daughter I tie the bedsheets

into a rope for my father

to escape the house he set alight




"Sylvanian Family is one of the most remarkable and stunning debut poetry pamphlets I have read in a long time. A haunted dollhouse of beautifully crafted humour and pain. I found such inspiration from these strange, alarming poems. Summer Young has captured something powerful here, a bizarre examination of love and what it means to suffer each other. I can't stop thinking about it." Bobby Parker




"In each poem in Sylvanian Family, Young presents us a set piece for formative experiences to be radically questioned, transformed, reclaimed. Written with bombastic surrealism, the urgency of childhood, and the quiet fury of one's inner animals, Young confronts the disturbed play of the oppressor in order to document and undo their transgressions. A deft personal portrait, with cerebral backflips and left hooks of humour throughout, every poem stings." Antosh Wojcik