Suzanna Fitzpatrick has had poems aired on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines in the UK, US, Ireland, Australia and Canada, including The Alchemy Spoon, Atrium, Brittle Star, Carmen et Error, Consilience, Dust, The Frogmore Papers, Impossible Archetype, Ink Sweat & Tears, Mslexia, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, Perverse, Poetry News, The Rialto, Spelt and The Waxed Lemon. Her anthology credits include The Emma Press, For Books’ Sake, Live Canon, Seren and Sidekick Books. She was longlisted for the 2018 National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize, won third prize in the 2025 Wolf Poetry and 2023 Shepton Snowdrops Competitions, second prize in the 2016 Café Writers and 2010 Buxton Competitions, and won the 2014 Hamish Canham Prize and the 2024 and 2025 Newcastle University Chancellor’s Prize. She is in her second year of the Poetry School and Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry. Her first pamphlet, Fledglings, was also published by Red Squirrel Press.

 

Crippled explores a childhood shadowed by a mother’s chronic illness with Multiple Sclerosis at a time when there was no treatment and little support. The first section is a sonnet sequence, the traditional form for love poetry containing the intense emotions around fear, uncertainty and the lived experience of a sick body. The second section, ‘Endgame’, is a sequence of short poems about death and the grieving process. Sharp reportage gives way to free form meditations about bereavement and the strange vagaries of grief, when the mind is reduced to ‘an overloaded processor / glitching, bug-ridden’. There is no cure for either death or grief: both are ‘a path through the woods’ which we all have to walk. Our best hope is to navigate it as honestly as we can. 

 

‘These are fearless and unflinching poems about family and illness, the difficulty of watching a parent’s decline, and how the force of love can carry us through adversity. Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s tremendous skill with form—firstly with the sonnet, that vehicle for elegy and tribute; and then with freer, more experimental structures—gives her a scaffolding for holding these harrowing words. These are poems about experiences that we must all face, and Fitzpatrick gives us a route through them with grace and sensitivity.’

 

—Tamar Yoseloff

 

‘In this fine and moving book, Suzanna Fitzpatrick sounds the lamentation for her mother, proving that heartfelt craft, melodic instinct and formal grace can voice grief as well as any shattered cry: the poetry is in the endeavour itself, an unquenchable light breaking through the sorrow.’

 

—Glyn Maxwell

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