Twice shortlisted for Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry, Eleanor Penny’s highly anticipated debut pamphlet, Mercy celebrates and shuttles between the visceral and vulnerable, the cruel and the kind. Eleanor attends to the assumptions we may make about the civilised self, assumptions all too often proven hollow or insubstantial in times of crisis. Concerned with the cosmologies of cruelty, love and obsession, Mercy is a dizzying yet finely orchestrated menagerie of dark fairytale, biblical allusion and metamorphosis, anchored by a sense of something intimate in every bright detail.

“…with a mystical sense of universal magic, Aguirre brings her literary world to vivid life. [These] characters haunt and intrigue…” ― Courttia Newland

“…brings to mind the work of Borges and Cortazar but with a wholly contemporary twist.” ― Julia Bell

“Niki Aguirre is that rarest of writers, one who possesses an exuberant imagination, but who also casts a devastatingly sharp eye on human reality.” ― Laila Lalami