“Yoseloff has listened to voices other than her own, has caught their words and made poems that help us remember.” London Grip

The Black Place is a dark and gorgeously multi-faceted artwork, like a black diamond. Tamar Yoseloff eschews the sentimental, embraces alternatives, offers antidotes to cheery capitalist hype. But there is a sort of dark grandeur to her view of mortality, one that matches the sublime desert painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, the subject of the title poem. The central sequence in this collection, ‘Cuts’, is a characteristically tough look at the poet's cancer diagnosis and treatment. The diagnosis arrives at the same time as the Grenfell Tower fire disaster, a public trauma overshadowing a private one. These poems focus on the strangeness of the illness, and of our times - they refuse to offer panaceas or consolations. 

Tamar Yoseloff's delicate and precise poems demonstrate a fearlessness in the cool way they approach difficult subjects. The Black Place, at once passionate, truthful and detached, applies that determined eye to the progress of a serious illness, and a wider sense of loss and decay. Yoseloff makes us look at the world and then look at it again to see something new.” Tim Dooley

“While The Black Place is rain-drenched and concrete-bunkered, a filmic urban vision stripped down to its inner grit, no one lyricises mean streets with such compassion as Tamar Yoseloff.” Claire Crowther

ISBN: 978-1-78172-559-7
Published by Seren Books, November 2019