Poetry Poison: Vices

This beautiful pocket-sized hardback gift book contains a carefully curated collection of poems compiled by Deborah Alma, founder of the Poetry Pharmacy, exploring our appetites, excesses and less-than-virtuous impulses.

A Distillation of the Finest Sins and Vices;
for the Indulgence of Appetites;
for Moments of Temptation and Relish;
for the Celebration of Excess;
to Encourage Delight in the Forbidden;
for the Cultivation of Delicious Bad Habits

Envy, greed, lust, pride, resentment, sloth, spite, ambition and longing: some of the oldest ingredients of the human condition. Poets have always written about them, often with considerable relish, finding humour, recognition and strange beauty in the less flattering corners of the soul.

Poetry Poison opens the locked cabinet of the Poetry Pharmacy. These are not gentle tonics or remedies for life’s ailments, but poems for exploring its darker registers. The series ventures into the feelings and impulses we might usually prefer to keep safely stoppered.

In Vices, the poems follow desire in its many forms: the ache of wanting, the temptation of excess, the poisonous sideways glance of envy, the swelling ego and the delicious temptation to do absolutely nothing at all. Some are comic, some tragic, some startlingly honest. Together they form a cabinet of human appetites and failings, arranged not for judgement but for examination.

These poems do not set out to improve you. Open the cabinet carefully.