Lamentation

Lamentation by Linda Kemp is a sustained poetic indictment of austerity and the financialisation of care, structured across seven long sections moving through workforce precarity, the NHS, adult social care, foodbanks, and the self-care industry. Kemp works in the registers of liturgy, biblical lament, and feminist political economy, fracturing syntax with tildes, doubled commas, and ruptured lineation so that critique and prayer share the same breath. A recurring refrain of repeated death tolls through the collection, while apostrophic addresses to Albion, to government, to capital itself hold the weight of an elegy for the welfare state. Tender, prophetic and unsparing, the book is at once analysis and threnody.