‘With its amusement park of a heart, mercurial wit, and sprightliness of a wild Appaloosa, Lily Blacksell’s poetry is impossible to predict – and even harder to resist. As true to its name as printed matter can be, Life Immediately is the most purely enjoyable collection I have read in years.' – Timothy Donnelly

‘Riotous, creatively quixotic, both funny and deadly serious, Lily Blacksell's poetry is the result of a hyperintelligent imagination striving to find a voice that is as various and playful as the self. A voice 'presenting the play of my skull, intact', which has the marvellous effect of relighting the known world.' – Richard Scott

‘The collection won me over with its unique imagination that takes the everyday and gives it a fresh inside-out. The mundane can be astonishing or even more mundane, if that’s possible, in a poetry that’s hilarious and complex, witty and wise, understated and extravagant. A rare talent brimming with charm and mischief!’ – Daljit Nagra

'These fresh, unegoistic and buoyant poems make the familiar funnier and more meaningful at once. Full of cracking one liners and uncanny imagery, it is a mood-altering collection that will successfully recruit the reader into its hunt for the unparaphrasable worthwhileness of life.' – Caoilinn Hughes

‘Poetry that's remarkably and uniquely tuned to the social, to sensations, to the natural comedy in womanhood, and to the personal art of daily existence.’ – Holly Pester

Born in London in 1993, Lily Blacksell grew up there and on the Isle of Wight. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2017 whilst living in the US. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and the Oxford Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the 2024 National Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, BOMB Magazine, Boston Review, Bath Magg, Magma, and elsewhere. She runs a poetry and music night called Canon Fodder which she hosts at The Social in London and at Glastonbury Festival. By day, and very often evening, Lily programmes events at The Conduit in Covent Garden, and has previously worked for Southbank Centre and the Royal Society of Literature.