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I Think We’re Alone Now is a bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh and original new voice in British poetry.
This was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.
So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.
Abigail Parry's first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. I Think We're Alone Now was shortlisted for the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize and for the English-language Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year Award 2024).
'Abigail Parry's I Think We’re Alone Now reveals a profound and original metaphysical imagination that examines the enigma of intimacy and its paradoxes. Impressive in its wealth of vocabularies, the poet's vision is razor sharp, with oceanic, but playful depths. This is a multi-layered collection to keep re-reading. No one in contemporary poetry writes like Abigail Parry.' – Pascale Petit, Wales Book of the Year 2024, on behalf of the Judges
"Abigail Parry, in her first collection, Jinx, performs twists and turns on playground games, ghost lore, cantrips and myths; the poems strike deep on matters of love and pleasure, sex and risk, as well as dazzle with their antic wit and control."—Marina Warner, New Statesman
'These are outstanding poems: constructed like a collection of beautifully made, trick, locked boxes, they are innovative, complex, and lush in their language and texture. In an explosion of gaming we find in the poems etymological digging, rare words, number games, anagrams, hidden shapes – as well as a range of experiments in traditional and contemporary form. This is poetry con brio, ambitious, far-reaching, but using disguise to tell hidden stories of emotion and pain.' – Jo Shapcott, on Jinx
'Abigail Parry brings a trickster’s delight in instability, not just to the old themes of innocence and experience, but to the shadowed and less commonly charted regions that lie between. Her poems move, and change, rapidly and headily, with a musical springiness that never flags and is all her own. Jinx is an abundant, exuberant, unsolemnly wise, and wholly beguiling first book that marks Parry out as the pace-setter of her generation.' – Christopher Reid, on Jinx
'What makes this collection thrilling is Parry's relentless and immense curiosity ... for all its allusiveness and its continual sidelong glances, I Think We're Alone Now is entirely companionable.' - Ian Sansom, The Daily Telegraph
‘The book I’d like to recommend is Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now … She can shock you and skin you with her wit, yet her poems feel strangely merciful, cleverly observant, and filled with references to everything from Rilke and Shakespeare to Richie Cordell and Radiohead.’ - Katie Munnik, Wales Arts Review (Books of the Year 2023)
‘Abigail Parry continues to write about anything she turns her eye on with cheerily nonchalant sprezzatura;’ – John Clegg, London Review Bookshop (Books of the Year 2023)
‘Shortlisted for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, this is a book which showcases Parry’s masterly grasp of some of the more challenging poetry principles: space, for one thing. Story, for another … there’s much to ponder, amuse, excite, and admire … as one reads this beetle-shiny, brilliantine, brain-bug of a book.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
‘These impressively, formally varied poems are precision-assembled, and there is something in each … which tells of meticulous planning, exacting execution and a mesmerising, unrelentingly creative mind.’ – Beth McDonagh, DURA on I Think We’re Alone Now
‘… my bookshelf wouldn’t be complete without Abigail Parry. When poetry is at its best, it tends to change your life. Jinx, Parry’s first collection, certainly changed mine. I am haunted by its poems. Lines and fragments from them have rooted deep in my memory.’ - Nell Prince, The Friday Poem (Bookshelf)
'A collection which looks through, around and beyond words, dissecting their "hinges and joints" in poems which are playfully skilful and intellectually rigorous in equal measure ... This is a collection dripping with the "flair / for the theatre", with words taking centre stage: a love song to language itself.' – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin 2023, on I Think We’re Alone Now
‘Brilliantly realised and very, very, very close to the eye. A major book.’ – Patrick Davidson Roberts, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023)
‘Abigail Parry’s second collection I Think We’re Alone Now is a complex, poly-voiced book which addresses a wide range of topics ... I Think We’re Alone Now offers a host, a crowd, of clamouring voices. It questions what makes an individual unique, what makes their life worthwhile.’ – Isabelle Thompson, The Friday Poem
‘Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now is witty and accomplished, revealing the imagination at serious play rather than passively enduring events and feelings. Parry explores the idea of poetry as a game, but one whose outcome is to deliver the player to the chill of mortality … It’s very funny and very dark. She’s a metaphysical poet: cosmology, sex, time and the subjunctive mood are all summoned to the page, revealing and withholding themselves by turns. More than this, Parry’s grasp of form is a delight, like watching a fly-fisher playing a lure on the water until the quarry surrenders itself and is completed in doing so. It’s a great pleasure to encounter work that uses the full keyboard like this. Parry’s is the outstanding collection here.’ – Sean O’Brien, The Telegraph
'Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now holds a transformative power as it is filtered through the idea of solitude. Parry is a lyricist who is attentive to the physicality of imagery, word choice and sound. Poems are saturated with images of sonic texture or a ‘whine in the word’. Ever observant Parry forces us to fixate on playful associations with pop music, film and footnotes.' – Paul Muldoon (with Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul), T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 judges
‘Beautiful, masterly rhythms are at work in this collection ... Sounds and symbols run through this work, animating it, like electric currents.' – Lennie Sanders, The Times Literary Supplement, on I Think We’re Alone Now
'It’s a reading experience like no other. Think verbal high octane rollercoaster ride, with unexpected phrases and vocabulary arriving at speed, and you’ll have some idea of the adventure Parry takes us on [...] This is a successful, entertaining book which covers a huge amount of ground with tremendous linguistic panache.' – Tamsin Hopkins, The Alchemy Spoon
‘Abigail Parry takes a sample of Humanity, mixes it up in her petri dish and then puts on her goggles, casts her eye on it under her microscope. And Aha! Here you go, guys […] If I Think We’re Alone Now wins Wales Book of The Year, it would be a fair reward for such an important body of work.’ – Rhian Elizabeth, Nation.Cymru
'I Think We’re Alone Now takes its play seriously. Parry misdirects as all good magicians do, but not for the sake of gaudy surface effect or for cynical dissection later. Her clever wordings lead to genuine emotional punch.' – Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Tupelo Quarterly
12 Speculum
14 Axonometric
16 In the dream of the cold restaurant
18 The Swords
20 Set piece with mackerel and seal
MARGINAL GLOSSES
24 English-speaking learners
25 English-speaking learners
26 English-speaking learners
27 English-speaking learners
COVERS
31 I Think We’re Alone Now
32 Les jeux
34 Whatever happened to Rosemarie?
35 It is the lark that sings so out of tune
37 Lore
39 Audio commentary
COMPLICATIONS
45 The Fly Dressers’ Guide
46 Intentional complications
49 Giallo
50 Muse
51 The true story of your own death
55 A fine distinction
56 All the blues
58 Rune poem for a funeral
60 Some remarks on the General Theory of Relativity
62 A beetle in a box
67 Ghost story in the subjunctive
69 Oversight
THE SQUINT
71 The Squint
83 Sparks