and "From that day on the surface was never enough. and "Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod - selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize - is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction.Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light - but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, and "the bloody hand holding back the skin, and " revealing and "the world's inner workings, rubbery and caught between the teeth. and " These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page.Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.