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Altar
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Spring 2025
The debut poetry collection from award-winning writer and spoken word artist, Desree, Altar explores multifaceted dimensions of sacrifice, challenging its heroism and examining its ties to servility. The poems in Altar urge their protagonists to play neither lion nor lamb, but to live and flourish on their own terms. Each page glimmers with vivid, often devastating we witness the resilience of youth, the strength of the Black female body, the complexity of chosen and unchosen family, the sweeping effects of gentrification. Through reflections on Black British identity, queer joy, place and belonging, faith and consent, Desree invites the reader on a journey of reclamation, while her wry wit and disarming tenderness hold us through the necessary storms that mark the way.
"Gorgeous in its redefining of self" Yomi Sode
"A collection of wonder and witness. These poems — both powerful and tender — grapple with the parallels of life and death, the body and spirit, loss and love, and demand a response." Rachel Long
"This is thrilling writing. Unexpected, alive, and curious. Desree enters the page, stage left." Joelle Taylor
"For those of us who wonder if we've been 'turned off at the wall', Desree's poems act as a we drop off selves we didn't realise we were carrying, and return, new and re-accepted into our own arms." Kareem Parkins-Brown
The debut poetry collection from award-winning writer and spoken word artist, Desree, Altar explores multifaceted dimensions of sacrifice, challenging its heroism and examining its ties to servility. The poems in Altar urge their protagonists to play neither lion nor lamb, but to live and flourish on their own terms. Each page glimmers with vivid, often devastating we witness the resilience of youth, the strength of the Black female body, the complexity of chosen and unchosen family, the sweeping effects of gentrification. Through reflections on Black British identity, queer joy, place and belonging, faith and consent, Desree invites the reader on a journey of reclamation, while her wry wit and disarming tenderness hold us through the necessary storms that mark the way.
"Gorgeous in its redefining of self" Yomi Sode
"A collection of wonder and witness. These poems — both powerful and tender — grapple with the parallels of life and death, the body and spirit, loss and love, and demand a response." Rachel Long
"This is thrilling writing. Unexpected, alive, and curious. Desree enters the page, stage left." Joelle Taylor
"For those of us who wonder if we've been 'turned off at the wall', Desree's poems act as a we drop off selves we didn't realise we were carrying, and return, new and re-accepted into our own arms." Kareem Parkins-Brown
- GenresPoetry
67 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 25, 2025
6 people want to read
About the author
Desree
3 books4 followersDesree is an award-winning writer, spoken word artist, educator and producer based in London and Slough. An alumna of Born: Free Writers Collective, Jerwood Arts and the Obsidian Foundation, Desree was Poet in Residence at Glastonbury Festival 2022 and Slough’s EMPOWORD. A familiar voice on BBC Radio Berkshire, her work has been broadcast on Sky Arts, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah; and published in JOY//US Poems of Queer Joy, Ink Sweat & Tears, Spoken Word London’s Anti-Hate Anthology and more. Desree's debut poetry collection, Altar, with Bad Betty Press, arrives in Spring 2025.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 21, 2025
I had to look this poetry collection up by its ISBN on here and this is what came up…so I’m marking it as read!
This collection - Altar - by poet and spoken word artist Desree is a beautiful book which explores the experience of Black queerness in England and her connection to Anguilla. It traces identity, religion, intergenerational relationships, histories, and connections amongst much else. Its tender explorations of loss and love really hit deep in such few words and pages.
I was incredibly lucky to hear Desree perform at a poetry festival (which is where I heard about and purchased the book!). They are a stellar performer, giving life anew to the words that are brimming off the page already. The collection is so spatially aware - of its place on the page and in the world. Many poems made me tear up.
The publisher, Bad Betty Press, has an amazing line up of authors and is doing an incredible amount of heavy lifting for the UK (and international) poetry scene. Desree and their other poets, like Jasmine Cooray and Agata Maslowska, who I also got to hear perform, have spurred a newfound love and appreciation for poetry.
I’ve read it twice already, it’s simply fantastic. Altar comes out March 25th, and I highly encourage you to purchase it and support an amazing artist and press!
This collection - Altar - by poet and spoken word artist Desree is a beautiful book which explores the experience of Black queerness in England and her connection to Anguilla. It traces identity, religion, intergenerational relationships, histories, and connections amongst much else. Its tender explorations of loss and love really hit deep in such few words and pages.
I was incredibly lucky to hear Desree perform at a poetry festival (which is where I heard about and purchased the book!). They are a stellar performer, giving life anew to the words that are brimming off the page already. The collection is so spatially aware - of its place on the page and in the world. Many poems made me tear up.
The publisher, Bad Betty Press, has an amazing line up of authors and is doing an incredible amount of heavy lifting for the UK (and international) poetry scene. Desree and their other poets, like Jasmine Cooray and Agata Maslowska, who I also got to hear perform, have spurred a newfound love and appreciation for poetry.
I’ve read it twice already, it’s simply fantastic. Altar comes out March 25th, and I highly encourage you to purchase it and support an amazing artist and press!
September 6, 2025
"The last days I was my brother's/eldest sibling I was told by a child/that my voice sounded like/I Had a rose stuck in my throat"
Blocked throats, uncomfortable silences, swallowed words: in ALTAR, some of Desree's most powerful poetic moments come in what is unsaid. Take "E.G.," where she lists dictionary definitions of words alongside conversations using these words as slang, the latter lines telling a story of crime and youthful violence that the "official" meanings of these terms cannot describe. In moments like the silence of queer desire in "Tell Yourself", Desree evokes the same eloquent story of repression that haunts images like her description of an "adventure playground some children/play on, others lie underneath".
However, whereas some of these poems employ free verse forms in a distinctive and commanding fashion—the way that "FLAT" combines a shaped poem and blank spaces to disrupt the process of reading and evoke the strange, oppressive urban landscape it describes, for instance—other poems use blocks of blank space in a manner that felt less directed, disrupting the verse form in ways that never struck me as persuasively complementing its content. Maybe it's a quality that would flourish in a spoken format, but these silences within ALTAR's poems had much less of an effect on me.
Blocked throats, uncomfortable silences, swallowed words: in ALTAR, some of Desree's most powerful poetic moments come in what is unsaid. Take "E.G.," where she lists dictionary definitions of words alongside conversations using these words as slang, the latter lines telling a story of crime and youthful violence that the "official" meanings of these terms cannot describe. In moments like the silence of queer desire in "Tell Yourself", Desree evokes the same eloquent story of repression that haunts images like her description of an "adventure playground some children/play on, others lie underneath".
However, whereas some of these poems employ free verse forms in a distinctive and commanding fashion—the way that "FLAT" combines a shaped poem and blank spaces to disrupt the process of reading and evoke the strange, oppressive urban landscape it describes, for instance—other poems use blocks of blank space in a manner that felt less directed, disrupting the verse form in ways that never struck me as persuasively complementing its content. Maybe it's a quality that would flourish in a spoken format, but these silences within ALTAR's poems had much less of an effect on me.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews