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Chaotic Good
WINNER OF THE JERWOOD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
A piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves.
Framed by the story of escape from a toxic marriage, Chaotic Good focuses on the incremental ways in which power accumulates, shifts and is relinquished within both home and community. Incisive, rigorous and artful, Isabelle Baafi reminds us of the importance of self-determination, and how, when we feel most eroded, we might discover what we need deep within 'This time and every time, I was the code I needed to find my way back.'
'With sure formal dexterity and an exciting precision of lyrical imagining, Baafi explores the complicated pathways of suspicion and uncertainty, and - most vitally - the simultaneous possibilities of threat and beauty, mistrust and hope, darkness and joy. The knowing narrative detail is charged as strongly with ideas as with feeling, resulting in a highly original fusion of resistance and compassionate determination.' Jane Draycott
'In this wise-hearted and deft debut, Baafi gets to the grain of family, inheritance, the grit of growing up and the grappling to become oneself.' Rachel Long
'Isabelle Baafi's Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance. Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that - with each turn of the chamber - brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus.' Will Harris
'Chaotic Good offers beautiful, urgent poems to remake our breaking world. From the playground all the way to the marriage bed, these redemption songs return to heal and emancipate.' alice hiller
SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
A piercing debut about how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves.
Framed by the story of escape from a toxic marriage, Chaotic Good focuses on the incremental ways in which power accumulates, shifts and is relinquished within both home and community. Incisive, rigorous and artful, Isabelle Baafi reminds us of the importance of self-determination, and how, when we feel most eroded, we might discover what we need deep within 'This time and every time, I was the code I needed to find my way back.'
'With sure formal dexterity and an exciting precision of lyrical imagining, Baafi explores the complicated pathways of suspicion and uncertainty, and - most vitally - the simultaneous possibilities of threat and beauty, mistrust and hope, darkness and joy. The knowing narrative detail is charged as strongly with ideas as with feeling, resulting in a highly original fusion of resistance and compassionate determination.' Jane Draycott
'In this wise-hearted and deft debut, Baafi gets to the grain of family, inheritance, the grit of growing up and the grappling to become oneself.' Rachel Long
'Isabelle Baafi's Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance. Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that - with each turn of the chamber - brings newly beautiful and painful shapes into focus.' Will Harris
'Chaotic Good offers beautiful, urgent poems to remake our breaking world. From the playground all the way to the marriage bed, these redemption songs return to heal and emancipate.' alice hiller
- GenresPoetryNonfictionFeminism
118 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 8, 2025
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130 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 9, 2025
You know when you read a line of poetry so beautiful it sends shivers up your spine and leaves you a little giddy? That happened to me several times reading this book. The author puts unexpected words to experiences in a way that really gets to the heart of the feelings behind them.
These poems take place during different times in her life, spanning childhood, a tumultuous adolescence and her eventual divorce. I think the poems set during her teen years will particularly resonate with women. She deftly explores the experience of growing up and exploring her own sexuality while simultaneously experiencing unwanted sexualization by others. Some of the poems look back on these experiences with a mature wisdom while others immerse the reader fully in the moment.
But my favourite poems are those at the end of the collection, as we meet the writer in real time and watch her step into her own identity. While the beautiful poems in the beginning and middle of the book are rooted in trauma, the collection ends on a hopeful note.
I definitely recommend this collection to poetry readers and I can’t wait to read more from this writer!
Thank you to the publisher for gifting me a copy of this book.
These poems take place during different times in her life, spanning childhood, a tumultuous adolescence and her eventual divorce. I think the poems set during her teen years will particularly resonate with women. She deftly explores the experience of growing up and exploring her own sexuality while simultaneously experiencing unwanted sexualization by others. Some of the poems look back on these experiences with a mature wisdom while others immerse the reader fully in the moment.
But my favourite poems are those at the end of the collection, as we meet the writer in real time and watch her step into her own identity. While the beautiful poems in the beginning and middle of the book are rooted in trauma, the collection ends on a hopeful note.
I definitely recommend this collection to poetry readers and I can’t wait to read more from this writer!
Thank you to the publisher for gifting me a copy of this book.
March 5, 2025
Isabelle Baafi chronicles the breakdown of her marriage and uncovers the marks of adolescent trauma in this incisive, fresh debut. Baafi plays with chronologies and tests the capacity of poetic form as she interrogates her own past. Through five deeply felt sections that magnify slices of time, she excavates the pieces of memory that make up a life.
January 28, 2025
This is exactly the type of poetry that I’m always looking for and love to read. With themes of love and identity shaped by our life’s experiences, this collection was perfectly personal and intimate. I feel connected to Isabelle Baafi in a way that makes me trust in the takeaways she left me. The poetic technique is outstanding with craftsmanship that begs to be explored for my own personal poetic pursuits. I loved how each poem is rich with vivid imagery and unique concepts. This collection is at the top of my all time list with poems I know I’ll return to time and time again.
February 3, 2026
Winner of the Jerwood Prize (the first collection section of the Forward Prize for poetry)
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize
I read this poetry collection – the author’s first– due to its longlisting for the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize, a prize for authors writing in English aged 39 and under (Thomas himself having died at that age) which is open to novels, short story collections, poetry collections and plays – one of three poetry collections this year.
I must admit poetry is not my preferred literary medium so that this is normally the only time of the year that I would read it but I enjoyed all three collections on this year’s prize list.
Here I think my enjoyment was assisted by the clear structure of the novel which signposted its themes and ideas. Broadly based around a woman escaping a toxic marriage the collection is divided into five sections representing different stages of life (not for the only time I was immediately reminded of the Nobel Prize winning poetry of Louise Gluck) and each has an opening poem named after an Effect (from physics, visual impacts, psychology, AI, chaos theory) which fits the way the poems reflect that stage of life.
The sections are:
Separation – opening with the Mpemba effect (where hot water freezes faster than cold water) and reflecting in many ways a way to defy what seems like the settled order of progression. The titular poem is a palandromic one, and later the section features one of my favourite poems “To the Woman sobbing into her phone on a park bench” which starts with the brilliant
Childhood – opening with the Kuleshov effect (where the meaning of an image e.g. a man’s actually neutral face is inferred from the images placed next to it) reflecting how a child’s view of the world is moulded by their surroundings.
Adolescence – opening with the Bystander Effect where the more people who witness someone in distress, the less likely anyone is to help. Initially I thought this reflected the public but ultimately often lonely experience of navigating transformative teenage years but I think it more reflects a series of five poems based on hangman P___Y which tells the author’s most terrifying memory of adolescence (a schoolgirl fight which actually turned out to be a violent unexpected assault) in a series of 6 poems (PARTY, PARRY, PENNY, PUSHY, PUTTY, PIGGY) from different viewpoints (both girls, the brother of the victim who sets his dogs on the spectators, a viewing neighbour and in the last poem – which uses a contrapuntal effect to explore the implicit racism of the police called to investigate the crowd that ran away from the scene).
Marriage – opening with Horizon effect (a problem in early computer attempts to play chess etc where the computer would optimise for a few moves but not the whole game) reflecting I think the risks of getting married early without thinking of the long term relationship. This section includes the titular poem – an autobiographical one when the narrator thinks she has spotted a friend at a cinema with another man but for me the strongest was the either/or approach of “I’m Here/Gone Delete as Appropriate” eg “that (joke/threat) you made – the one about the spider who (worshipped/devoured) her mate after he fathered her child”.
Rebirth – opening with the famous Butterfly effect, reflecting I think how small choices have life long effects – with the emphasis here (just as with the opening) on the positive implications of that and which opens with a butterfly effect poem (two mirror poems with each line having its words reversed on the mirror side). This contained two excellent poems; Sankofa in which the narrator of the poem as I interpret it goes back to when she was 21, 28, 7, 14 and then forward to 35 and 42 – advising her young er and older self how to navigate life’s vicissitudes; and my favourite poem of all “Lost Sheep” which I interpreted about the loss and then tentative re-exploration of faith – of which some extracts
Overall a fascinating collection.
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize
I read this poetry collection – the author’s first– due to its longlisting for the 2026 Dylan Thomas Prize, a prize for authors writing in English aged 39 and under (Thomas himself having died at that age) which is open to novels, short story collections, poetry collections and plays – one of three poetry collections this year.
I must admit poetry is not my preferred literary medium so that this is normally the only time of the year that I would read it but I enjoyed all three collections on this year’s prize list.
Here I think my enjoyment was assisted by the clear structure of the novel which signposted its themes and ideas. Broadly based around a woman escaping a toxic marriage the collection is divided into five sections representing different stages of life (not for the only time I was immediately reminded of the Nobel Prize winning poetry of Louise Gluck) and each has an opening poem named after an Effect (from physics, visual impacts, psychology, AI, chaos theory) which fits the way the poems reflect that stage of life.
The sections are:
Separation – opening with the Mpemba effect (where hot water freezes faster than cold water) and reflecting in many ways a way to defy what seems like the settled order of progression. The titular poem is a palandromic one, and later the section features one of my favourite poems “To the Woman sobbing into her phone on a park bench” which starts with the brilliant
I write the poem to forget you. To study you.
To keep you safe. Whichever you can forgive.
With a metre that mocks your palpitations,
a slant rhyme placing tomb on top of you.
Because like you I have never been as perfect
as a first-born son in his mother’s eyes.
Childhood – opening with the Kuleshov effect (where the meaning of an image e.g. a man’s actually neutral face is inferred from the images placed next to it) reflecting how a child’s view of the world is moulded by their surroundings.
Adolescence – opening with the Bystander Effect where the more people who witness someone in distress, the less likely anyone is to help. Initially I thought this reflected the public but ultimately often lonely experience of navigating transformative teenage years but I think it more reflects a series of five poems based on hangman P___Y which tells the author’s most terrifying memory of adolescence (a schoolgirl fight which actually turned out to be a violent unexpected assault) in a series of 6 poems (PARTY, PARRY, PENNY, PUSHY, PUTTY, PIGGY) from different viewpoints (both girls, the brother of the victim who sets his dogs on the spectators, a viewing neighbour and in the last poem – which uses a contrapuntal effect to explore the implicit racism of the police called to investigate the crowd that ran away from the scene).
Marriage – opening with Horizon effect (a problem in early computer attempts to play chess etc where the computer would optimise for a few moves but not the whole game) reflecting I think the risks of getting married early without thinking of the long term relationship. This section includes the titular poem – an autobiographical one when the narrator thinks she has spotted a friend at a cinema with another man but for me the strongest was the either/or approach of “I’m Here/Gone Delete as Appropriate” eg “that (joke/threat) you made – the one about the spider who (worshipped/devoured) her mate after he fathered her child”.
Rebirth – opening with the famous Butterfly effect, reflecting I think how small choices have life long effects – with the emphasis here (just as with the opening) on the positive implications of that and which opens with a butterfly effect poem (two mirror poems with each line having its words reversed on the mirror side). This contained two excellent poems; Sankofa in which the narrator of the poem as I interpret it goes back to when she was 21, 28, 7, 14 and then forward to 35 and 42 – advising her young er and older self how to navigate life’s vicissitudes; and my favourite poem of all “Lost Sheep” which I interpreted about the loss and then tentative re-exploration of faith – of which some extracts
I grew up in a silent house
but faith is noisy faith sounds like scraping chairs and rustling envelopes
feedback from a dented microphone
the laughter of women counting coins in the back roon the choir coordinator's squeaking shoes mama joy scoffing at sister anne's puff puff
someone would shout glory whenever john 10:10 was rea a guttural cry that juddered my soles
it was forty days and nights before I realised that the voice
was mine
there is a certain light that only shines on closed eyes you feel its warmth on your second skin and run towards it while standing still
…..
this is your last time don't tell a soul
leave quietly halfway through the message
out the back door that a dove once flew into
…..
tear out the page with colossians 3:18 underlined
struggle to pray for two years after
forgetting how …. wondering why
when a pastor stops you in the street
invites you back
tell him that the lost sheep wasn't lost
she was searching
and in that wilderness she found
not a burning bush but a smouldering weed
and its fire doesn't speak but it keeps her warm
and most days that is enough
Overall a fascinating collection.
April 17, 2025
2.5 just didn’t do much for me
September 6, 2025
"This poem is a lie/waxing true."
As its title might imply, this collection brims with contradiction and nervous energy, demonstrating the range of effects that can be evoked by autobiographical, or at least distinctly personal, poetry. Some are serious commentaries on predatory relationships and gendered social expectations, like "The Bystander Effect", while "The Kuleshov Effect" turns its lens inward to examine how its speaker views themselves. I'm not usually fond of long poems constructed out of short lines, a structure that I feel can often inhibit the rhythm of verse, but "hotboxing" uses three such columns of verse to a page, breathlessly telling a story in a slangy and forceful style that complements the page-filling layout of this piece. Or you might find its complete opposite in "My mother calls", which is so minimalist it could easily have come off as trite, yet somehow lands a thoughtful emotional punch when placed in the context of Baafi's wider examination of identity and memory.
All of this culminates in "Sankofa", a piece which draws on the name-and-age format of online confessionals ("...I go back to save you (21) from yourself..."). It embraces the sense of intimate disclosure that CHAOTIC GOOD deploys to exquisite effect, while also keeping a lighthearted sense of distance, this device calling attention to the performative side inherent in such disclosures, which Baafi meticulously anatomises through poems named for various scientific and technical effects, placing a capstone on the agility and wit that defines this collection.
As its title might imply, this collection brims with contradiction and nervous energy, demonstrating the range of effects that can be evoked by autobiographical, or at least distinctly personal, poetry. Some are serious commentaries on predatory relationships and gendered social expectations, like "The Bystander Effect", while "The Kuleshov Effect" turns its lens inward to examine how its speaker views themselves. I'm not usually fond of long poems constructed out of short lines, a structure that I feel can often inhibit the rhythm of verse, but "hotboxing" uses three such columns of verse to a page, breathlessly telling a story in a slangy and forceful style that complements the page-filling layout of this piece. Or you might find its complete opposite in "My mother calls", which is so minimalist it could easily have come off as trite, yet somehow lands a thoughtful emotional punch when placed in the context of Baafi's wider examination of identity and memory.
All of this culminates in "Sankofa", a piece which draws on the name-and-age format of online confessionals ("...I go back to save you (21) from yourself..."). It embraces the sense of intimate disclosure that CHAOTIC GOOD deploys to exquisite effect, while also keeping a lighthearted sense of distance, this device calling attention to the performative side inherent in such disclosures, which Baafi meticulously anatomises through poems named for various scientific and technical effects, placing a capstone on the agility and wit that defines this collection.
July 15, 2025
for me this was a bit of a mixed bag, the first few sections of the book were great but the latter few weren’t as good for me.
the descriptions are all so vivid and on a line based level some of the poems are beautifully put.
a lot of the poems are powerful and show easy meaning, again more so nearer the start.
(i didn’t read on kindle but gr doesn’t yet list a pb copy with the correct cover option.)
the descriptions are all so vivid and on a line based level some of the poems are beautifully put.
a lot of the poems are powerful and show easy meaning, again more so nearer the start.
(i didn’t read on kindle but gr doesn’t yet list a pb copy with the correct cover option.)
January 19, 2026
“My forgiveness brings all the damned to the yard.
My fine print sings only their praise.
I sew gold into my weave, stir up fake friends
like morning brew: too frothed up. Semi-sinned.
Dividing lies by the truth I made,
charting my future
by the prophecy I became.”
The ending to end all endings!
My fine print sings only their praise.
I sew gold into my weave, stir up fake friends
like morning brew: too frothed up. Semi-sinned.
Dividing lies by the truth I made,
charting my future
by the prophecy I became.”
The ending to end all endings!
September 28, 2025
I will never have this much control over any language in my entire life and I am in awe that someone could ever be. thoroughly enjoyable.
October 27, 2025
I liked the poems in the final section Rebirth the best.
February 11, 2026
Gorgeous, the crisp language is so beautiful and just barely covers the depth of emotion lurking underneath
February 17, 2026
Read as a student on the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2026 module.
Review to come after assessment results.
Review to come after assessment results.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews