Clare Pollard wrote most of these poems while still at school in Bolton. Too young, perhaps, to expect anyone to take her seriously, but young enough to question that assumption and much else besides. Her poems are fresh and energetic, barbed with a modern girl’s natural cynicism, but tempered with open-eyed hope as well as wry acceptance. In The Heavy-Petting Zoo, the male of the species is shown in all his preening glory, his growling and posturing exposed but also given marks out of ten. The book gives us the world according to Clare Pollard writing as a teenager, an insider’s in-your-face portrayal of the tarnished lives of today’s bright young things.

"This is such a striking first book that at any age it would be remarkable - from a teenage writer it leaves you excited that there may be so much more to come." - Time Out

"Pollard writes entirely and authentically out of the excited anxieties of female adolescence: its quixotic hopes, its merciless bitchiness and its maiming disappointments...The violent colours, the abrupt swerves of thought and the wilfully obscuring bruising of Pollard's poems distinguish them from the usual twenty-something constructions." - The Times