Belladonna
Belladonna was Suna’s debut work. A 200-line poem, it was published with Broken Sleep Books’ innovative pamphlet imprint Legitimate Snack, which has published the likes of J. H. Prynne, Wayne Holloway-Smith, and many other mainstays of contemporary British poetry.
The pamphlet is a beautiful object, set in Garamond, with a plain nightshade-blue cover and golden endpapers; the illustration Suna designed herself, based on traditional taxonomy studies. Belladonna sold out two print runs in a matter of days.
If you’d like to listen to the opening of the second section of the poem “Soothsayers”, Suna read a section for the Alone Together podcast. It is wonderfully produced by VerseFirst Poetry and appropriately atmospheric.
Reviews of Belladonna:
‘Belladonna has the horizons of a major work, and is one of the most ambitious debuts I’ve ever read.’
— Becky Varley-Winter, Poetry London
‘Both grounded and detached, playing with a sense of narrative but also revelling in the rarefied brightness of the image, Suna Afshan’s debut chapbook Belladonna, from Broken Sleep Books, is an experience notable for its intensity and a sense of writing that comes from beyond time. […] Afshan ends up offering something fresh and direct: new blood for old ceremonies. Compelling and sinuous, displaying poetry of the root and the gut, Belladonna is a debut pamphlet to savour.’
— Daniel Bennett, Wild Court
‘[My] eyes are wide at the breadth and scope of what’s written.’
— Matt Riches, London Grip
‘Belladonna reminded me of a line in Jorie Graham’s “Prayer”, where she wonders if it is “My desperate eye looking too hard. / Or the eye of the world / looking too hard”. Afshan’s look on the world and the world’s reciprocal look back at the poem produces an enigmatic perspective. The poem excites a need to grasp that intangible sensibility which makes it move from one thought to the next. Yet this sense escapes the hold of meaning time and again, pleasingly unsettling the mind.’
— Nikita Baswal, Ambit