Description
There Is No Word Alive For What I Am is a handbook for unruly women, with poems leaning unashamedly into desire, grief, rage, and the freedom that comes from honouring the weirdest parts of the self. Cold bus stops and sleepless nights hold surprising, surreal and tender moments of illumination – the spring light speaks, Hilary Mantel comes to visit, and euphoria is halloumi fries on a garage forecourt. Rachel Jeffcoat’s debut collection is a full-throated song to life and hope.
Rachel Jeffcoat is a poet and educator whose work has appeared in publications such as Under the Radar, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, The London Magazine, and Poetry Ireland Review. She has won or placed in competitions such as Poems of Light (Candlestick Press, 2024), the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Prize (2025), and the Winchester Poetry Prize (2025). Her pamphlet ‘Familiar’ was published as part of Primers Volume Eight (Nine Arches Press, 2026). Raised in Bradford, West Yorkshire, she now lives in rural Hampshire, in an old house full of children and books.
Praise for Rachel Jeffcoat
“Rachel’s writing holds wildflowers, bodies, ghosts and inherited stories, they all sit side by side and whisper something to us so the everyday becomes mythic and the mythic becomes startlingly intimate. There is something amazingly paw-like about her work. It’s tender but never tame. It scratches and digs. Rachel writes with a rare honesty about womanhood, inheritance, desire and memory whilst asking difficult questions around the stories we inherit about ourselves and the physical bodies we live and love in.”
~ Laurie Bolger
