Kathrine Sowerby lives in Glasgow, Scotland. Her poems, stories and translations have been published widely in journals and anthologies and she has taken part in poetry translation projects in Pakistan (Highlight Arts) and Latvia (Latvian Literature). She has an MFA from Glasgow School of Art, an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University, and received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust. Her chapbooks include Unnecessarily Emphatic and Tired Blue Mountain (red ceilings press) and Margaret and Sunflower (dancing girl press). In 2017 her collection that bird loved was published by Hesterglock Press and her book of stories The Spit, The Sound and The Nest by Vagabond Voices. Her collection of 62 prose poems, House However, was published in 2018 by Vagabond Voices. In 2022, Tutu, a hybrid collection of writing and drawing, was published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe and (Find Yourself) at Constant Falls, a 108 poem sequence, by Blue Diode Press. 

On “Unnecessarily Emphatic” – The dreams of those of us without a gift for narrative often show great narrative flair. Here, the sleeper is a linguistics textbook, the dream its payload of example sentences: words which were meant to be looked at but never into. Is this the story Language itself needed to tell, or a tale hidden in plain view by a linguist too shy to speak? We can never know if the troubled and self-questioning protagonists of “Unnecessarily Emphatic” are anything more than projections of our own troubled self-questioning. It’s all the more moving for that – it’s our story, a human document willed into being by sheer force of hope. – Peter Manson