About Rebecca Goss

Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth, was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2013, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. Her second pamphlet Carousel, a collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge, was published by Guillemot Press in 2018.

Rebecca’s third full-length collection, Girl, was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2019 and Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, 2019. She is the winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize 2022. Her latest collection, Latch, set in Suffolk, was published with Carcanet in 2023. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD by Publication from the University of East Anglia. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge2020-22 and at the University of Suffolk 2022-23.

I am delighted that Latch is included in this year’s Wild Reads, and in such fine company. I believe I benefit creatively and emotionally from being immersed in the natural world. My book was mostly written outdoors, with many of the poems composed in my head as I walked the fields and green lanes of Suffolk. As part of the Wild Reads project I shall be running creative writing workshops in Suffolk libraries and reading from Latch. I look forward to connecting with others who know and love this county like I do.

About Latch

Rebecca Goss’ fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents’ and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters.

The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county’s stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.