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Small
We all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles the bushes below Juliet’s balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her bare body, ‘nipples stiffening on powdered ribs’. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend – the squat skull grinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child, ‘spiralling like sycamore’ from the walls of Troy, her husband brutally dragged to death in the dirt that rises around her. All the while, weaved throughout this collection, the narrator is haunted by her biggest demon of all: the gargantuan Small. Told with a rawness and honesty that sears, the secretive nature of living with an eating disorder is yanked out into the open and given the voice that only ever hisses darkly inside the skull. Through relationship breakdowns, bath-times, the cacophonous dazzle of Delhi and the fug of hospital waiting rooms, Small is always, there slyly riding on the shoulders of a woman running for miles to get away – yet forever haunted by hunger.
80 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2021
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May 3, 2025
In her memoir, ‘The Time Between’, Nancy Tucker, then a 22-year-old student, writes of the “black reality of her body breaking down to the electric highs of starvation”. For Nancy, who is “too big and too small and too much and not enough […] the only solution is to get smaller and smaller […] and then one day disappear”.
And it is that fixation with the pursuit of ‘smaller’, the descent into an eating disorder, that we read about in the latest collection Small by Natalie Ann Holborow, a Swansea-born writer of poetry and fiction. Natalie’s published poetry includes 'And Suddenly You Find Yourself' (Parthian Books, 2017) and ‘The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass’ (Black Rabbit Press, 2020) with Mari Ellis Dunning. Her work was listed in Wales Arts Reviews 'Best Of The Year' for 2017 and 2020.
This collection immerses us in the conflict between self and other; the animal struggle with the indefinable (Small) personified from a mind and body dislocated by diabetes and anorexia. The narrator describes her inner unrest and deceit, hurt and pain; a voodoo doll to pin and punish, out of kilter with the world. Small is cloaked within, binding the individual sinew and sense in the constant need for attention.
‘We all have our favourite demons. Small is born
out of angles and nerves, has a brain
the weight of a fingernail. Clunks into life
like a terrible clock, counting the bars of her ribs.’
‘GOOD MORNING SMALL’ is our introduction to a creature gaining form and fury, a twist on the conventional norm of gaslighting of a malign human influence and deception. The poetic speaker’s malevolent alter-ego exists only within her own psyche. And ‘BATHING’ takes us deeper into that distorted room of mirrors and one of many inner-voice taunts from Small, using well-crafted and charged imagery, spike-laden tones and intrinsic speaking rhythms:
‘I took to bathing at odd times of the night. […] At night, tired of wishing myself
slim as a cat’s whisker, ribbon-thin, […] Wiping the mirror / she found me like frost,
bath-wrinkled and laughing - / Bent my bones to her / like brambles, like hunger.’
In ‘DIAGNOSIS’, we read about a young person’s disorientation around what diabetes means; how it suddenly changes everything; her pancreas ‘this bunch-of-grapes useless inside me, a bobbing fish flipped over.’ It is a likely trigger for her eating disorder; the endless turbulence of treatment and hospital visits (‘HYPERGLYCAEMIA’) and diabetes burnout, combined with the loss of someone close (‘GRIEF’ and ‘DEFEAT’) and the fallout of broken relationships (‘SMALL SENDS HIM PACKING’ and ‘ADDERS’). All too much, all too soon in life. She holds our attention throughout by the intensity between the physical and the psychological. She draws us directly into contemporary perceptions of body and mind, and the inner voice that constantly tests our human frailties.
In ‘GESTALT THERAPY’, the narrator is twisted out of comfort’s shape, biting her psychiatrist back with an acid tongue. Here we catch full force of a voice and onomatopoeic sound hints of confrontation:
‘what is empathy / earth roots / wires / hissing dirt / the mad garden hand patting / wet compost fists / what colour / is empathy / wipe old nuts and dust / from my tongue / citalopram weighs /
an eyeful of coins / tell me / no tell me / ever snapped a chair leg and felt it’
As readers, we cannot help imagining Small becoming part of us, seizing our inner identity, seeping into every area of our lives. The alter-ego Small is always in the room and serves as counterpoint critic - our worst cellmate. Holborow is skillful in maintaining this sense of war and inner-turmoil.
The constant onslaught of the poetic speakers’ warring conditions in this collection is punctuated by a series of interludes, including poems touching on Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Angel Gabriel, and portraits of India. Here is ‘Romeo’, with more than a hint of love’s urge and sexual attraction:
‘These days, Juliet forgets on purpose / to draw the curtains, smacks /
here thighs, talcumed and pink, / armpits still crackling / with bubbles. […]
poor Romeo / circles the bushes below /waiting for a glimpse / of bare arse, nubbed breasts, /
nipples stiffening / on powdered ribs. A smudge of oil / glistening on one clean shoulder.’
These interlude poems are playful and dance with a vibrant humour that demonstrate her wide ranging skill to inhabit the minds and bodies and indeed personalities of others. Her characters are inventive and irreverent. She also paints a gorgeous canvas with her impressions of India, casting lines of sensation with aplomb.
In the devastating final poem, ‘SMALL GETS RESUSITATED’, even at the pivotal moment of A&E emergency resuscitation, the voice of the anorexic co-conspirator. Small lies ready to pounce amid the narrator’s ongoing maelstrom of diabetes and anorexia. The narrator literally captures the charged air in the sonic bursts and intensity of her voice:
‘Curtain snatched upwards in a gust of emergency / ribs split /
like a binder / someone tugs up here sleeve / there it is […]
stand clear / the panicked slam of my desperate hands / haul her back from the tunnel /
the rib snapped shut / a sudden myocardiogram paddles back to life /
and Small is back, laughing her head off’
The poetry of Natalie Ann Holborow in Small takes us whole. It shreds us with the turmoil of mind and body, with pulsing tones and the ostinato punch, the cadence and characteristics of a dynamic, live-performance poet. The text is sparkling and visceral, with breathtaking insight into our vulnerabilities. There is an urge to bring the text fully alive and present the exorcism of demons within. ‘Small’ has a musicality that is both contemporary and classic.
There are echoes of Holborow’s hometown Dylan Thomas, and parallels in the balance between love and death, the language that inhabits that balance, and the loss of innocence and youth. And there are resonances with the psychological landscape in Sylvia Plath’s poems: the modern insecurities of women and an intense inward focus around issues of mental health, relationships and emotional pain.
Small is brave, honest and straight-eyed, overlaid with a rare passion that confronts the edges of human fragility. The weight and force of its characters are centre stage in a raw telling that shines a soul-trapping and valuable light on the invisible stigmata of pressure to conform to body-image perfection.
And it is that fixation with the pursuit of ‘smaller’, the descent into an eating disorder, that we read about in the latest collection Small by Natalie Ann Holborow, a Swansea-born writer of poetry and fiction. Natalie’s published poetry includes 'And Suddenly You Find Yourself' (Parthian Books, 2017) and ‘The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass’ (Black Rabbit Press, 2020) with Mari Ellis Dunning. Her work was listed in Wales Arts Reviews 'Best Of The Year' for 2017 and 2020.
This collection immerses us in the conflict between self and other; the animal struggle with the indefinable (Small) personified from a mind and body dislocated by diabetes and anorexia. The narrator describes her inner unrest and deceit, hurt and pain; a voodoo doll to pin and punish, out of kilter with the world. Small is cloaked within, binding the individual sinew and sense in the constant need for attention.
‘We all have our favourite demons. Small is born
out of angles and nerves, has a brain
the weight of a fingernail. Clunks into life
like a terrible clock, counting the bars of her ribs.’
‘GOOD MORNING SMALL’ is our introduction to a creature gaining form and fury, a twist on the conventional norm of gaslighting of a malign human influence and deception. The poetic speaker’s malevolent alter-ego exists only within her own psyche. And ‘BATHING’ takes us deeper into that distorted room of mirrors and one of many inner-voice taunts from Small, using well-crafted and charged imagery, spike-laden tones and intrinsic speaking rhythms:
‘I took to bathing at odd times of the night. […] At night, tired of wishing myself
slim as a cat’s whisker, ribbon-thin, […] Wiping the mirror / she found me like frost,
bath-wrinkled and laughing - / Bent my bones to her / like brambles, like hunger.’
In ‘DIAGNOSIS’, we read about a young person’s disorientation around what diabetes means; how it suddenly changes everything; her pancreas ‘this bunch-of-grapes useless inside me, a bobbing fish flipped over.’ It is a likely trigger for her eating disorder; the endless turbulence of treatment and hospital visits (‘HYPERGLYCAEMIA’) and diabetes burnout, combined with the loss of someone close (‘GRIEF’ and ‘DEFEAT’) and the fallout of broken relationships (‘SMALL SENDS HIM PACKING’ and ‘ADDERS’). All too much, all too soon in life. She holds our attention throughout by the intensity between the physical and the psychological. She draws us directly into contemporary perceptions of body and mind, and the inner voice that constantly tests our human frailties.
In ‘GESTALT THERAPY’, the narrator is twisted out of comfort’s shape, biting her psychiatrist back with an acid tongue. Here we catch full force of a voice and onomatopoeic sound hints of confrontation:
‘what is empathy / earth roots / wires / hissing dirt / the mad garden hand patting / wet compost fists / what colour / is empathy / wipe old nuts and dust / from my tongue / citalopram weighs /
an eyeful of coins / tell me / no tell me / ever snapped a chair leg and felt it’
As readers, we cannot help imagining Small becoming part of us, seizing our inner identity, seeping into every area of our lives. The alter-ego Small is always in the room and serves as counterpoint critic - our worst cellmate. Holborow is skillful in maintaining this sense of war and inner-turmoil.
The constant onslaught of the poetic speakers’ warring conditions in this collection is punctuated by a series of interludes, including poems touching on Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Angel Gabriel, and portraits of India. Here is ‘Romeo’, with more than a hint of love’s urge and sexual attraction:
‘These days, Juliet forgets on purpose / to draw the curtains, smacks /
here thighs, talcumed and pink, / armpits still crackling / with bubbles. […]
poor Romeo / circles the bushes below /waiting for a glimpse / of bare arse, nubbed breasts, /
nipples stiffening / on powdered ribs. A smudge of oil / glistening on one clean shoulder.’
These interlude poems are playful and dance with a vibrant humour that demonstrate her wide ranging skill to inhabit the minds and bodies and indeed personalities of others. Her characters are inventive and irreverent. She also paints a gorgeous canvas with her impressions of India, casting lines of sensation with aplomb.
In the devastating final poem, ‘SMALL GETS RESUSITATED’, even at the pivotal moment of A&E emergency resuscitation, the voice of the anorexic co-conspirator. Small lies ready to pounce amid the narrator’s ongoing maelstrom of diabetes and anorexia. The narrator literally captures the charged air in the sonic bursts and intensity of her voice:
‘Curtain snatched upwards in a gust of emergency / ribs split /
like a binder / someone tugs up here sleeve / there it is […]
stand clear / the panicked slam of my desperate hands / haul her back from the tunnel /
the rib snapped shut / a sudden myocardiogram paddles back to life /
and Small is back, laughing her head off’
The poetry of Natalie Ann Holborow in Small takes us whole. It shreds us with the turmoil of mind and body, with pulsing tones and the ostinato punch, the cadence and characteristics of a dynamic, live-performance poet. The text is sparkling and visceral, with breathtaking insight into our vulnerabilities. There is an urge to bring the text fully alive and present the exorcism of demons within. ‘Small’ has a musicality that is both contemporary and classic.
There are echoes of Holborow’s hometown Dylan Thomas, and parallels in the balance between love and death, the language that inhabits that balance, and the loss of innocence and youth. And there are resonances with the psychological landscape in Sylvia Plath’s poems: the modern insecurities of women and an intense inward focus around issues of mental health, relationships and emotional pain.
Small is brave, honest and straight-eyed, overlaid with a rare passion that confronts the edges of human fragility. The weight and force of its characters are centre stage in a raw telling that shines a soul-trapping and valuable light on the invisible stigmata of pressure to conform to body-image perfection.
September 20, 2025
From the first poem titled, ‘Never Date A Poet’ you know this is going to be good and you aren’t disappointed. This is one of those strange intoxicating books of poetry that is quite unique. Natalie Ann Holborow delights, disturbs and dazzles.
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