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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Spotter’s Guide to Invisible Things by Laura Theis

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This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from A Spotter’s Guide to Invisible Things by Laura Theis (Live Cannon Poetry Ltd. 2023).

in which we introduce ourselves

everyone cares about
the lonely whale bull

we believe him to be sad
singing on his own for

nobody’s benefit
we identify with his perceived

pointlessness what good is a whale
without his pod

we wonder



& we all care about cliff hangers
if the film opens with a shot

of a climber dangling
from a precipice

we don’t want the stranger to fail
or come to harm

we want to shout something
loud and trite like

hang on in there buddy



& we are primed for the colour red
because it might spell somebody’s blood

we are programmed to draw
close to each other at night

around whatever passes for a fire
to share whatever passes for a story

whilst each of us breathes through
eight hundred trees’ worth of oxygen

which is why when we pray we pray mostly to wood

Laura Theis writes poetry, songs, and fiction in her second language. She received a Distinction from Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing. Her work appears in journals such as Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Mslexia, Magma, Rattle, and Strange Horizons, and has been widely anthologized by Candlestick Press, Broken Sleep Books, Pan Macmillan, and Aesthetica, amongst many others. Her Elgin-Award-nominated debut how to extricate yourself, an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. Her collection A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things won the Live Canon Collection Prize and received the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors.

JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.


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