There is a deliberately overexposed quality to Cecilia Knapp’s poems: they take place in troubled light. Bright yet bleak, they hold the attention. She belongs loosely within a Kae Tempest, Hollie McNish, tell-it-like-it-is, streetwise (or, where necessary, street-foolish) school of poetry. She was young people’s laureate for London between 2020 and 2021 and this collection, her debut, begins in a brazenly anti-poetic way, as un-self-servingly revealing as the sudden emptying of a handbag. I Used to Eat KFC Zingers Without Hating Myself opens with a line straining not to become a poem: “Order cat litter off Amazon.” And what follows is an intriguingly miscellaneous decanting of her mind:
I use emojis
to avoid conflict. Worry I’m a gentrifier.
