‘Like amber, these poems capture moments of time, place and feeling' Lemn Sissay, author of My Name is Why

'An assured debut . . . It's not just the Dickensian narrative that's gripping , but the way it brings different forms to bear on its material' Guardian

'Don’t worry, I’m here in the house where every room has a name, but children’s names are often forgotten.'

Uplifting and heart-breaking, this lyrical evocation of a childhood on the edge of society marks the arrival of a vital new voice.

MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family: a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they’re taken into care, in a children’s home that forcibly separates them.

With a verve and playfulness that belies their pain, these poems explore what it means to belong. Through daring experiments with form and narrative, MINX captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.

'Fiercely imaginative and wonderfully unexpected' Ruth Padel, author of Girl

"‘Like amber, these poems capture moments of time, place and feeling which otherwise would be unseen and ignored. How are we to survive our memories if they are not held like this? Every one of us who are writers must document our time in care and outside of it. I found Minx heartbreaking. Downs-Barton warns, “Children who stay here become line drawings nobody / colours in.” It’s a line I will never forget. There are more’" - Lemn Sissay, author of MY NAME IS WHY

"‘Minx is a splinter of a book, something that interrupts the body. It's a beautiful violence, each page a shock of poetry that renders an underclass family vivid. Rich, delicate, and brutal, Minx is essential reading, a constant companion. Read it’" - Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto and Othered Poems

"‘Minx by Karen Downs-Barton is a work of linguistic and formal daring, a poetry collection that inhabits the liminal spaces of identity with precision and verve. Through its incisive engagement with the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller experience, the book interrogates cultural hybridity – half one, half the other – as both a fracture and a site of creative possibility. Downs-Barton’s unflinching diction dismantles the structures of racism and cultural erasure while interrogating the complex legacies of belonging and inheritance. “I practise the language my grandparents spoke,” she writes, reanimating tradition as an act of resistance and renewal. Minx is a vital contribution to contemporary poetics, a text that challenges, witnesses, and transforms with every line’" - David Morley, author of The Invisible Gift