Description: These poems are about secrets between patient and doctor, secrets held in front of glowing screens, secrets between lovers.
They're about little lies, little acts of theft, big lies, lies newly uncovered or not yet discovered.Hear the speech of a shadow. See it stop by a mirror. There is art in the darkness.The King's Liars is the debut chapbook from UK poet Susan Gordon Byron.Brief description: Susan Gordon Byron (she/her) is a multi-hyphenate creative based in London. She is fascinated by art history, design, and the more devious side of human nature. She may on occasion, and by accident, sound like a character in a movie, anyone from Elizabeth Bennett to Hermione Granger. Her poetry has been published by Dust, Porridge, Frazzled Lit and the Seaford Review among others, and she was longlisted for the Bournemouth Writing Prize 2025.
Review Quotes:
"Byron's poems are spectacular fun. Playful, strange and at times unsettling, The King's Liars offers a catalogue of uncanny happenings: a bedroom turning itself inside out; shoes so small 'they can hide in other shoes'; a thought made visible like a rope uncoiling. Strange men appear too: a man with ivy for eyes, and a man who sits inside a room inside someone's throat. But beneath the surrealism is an unspoken darkness, a 'bottled black quiet' of unanswered questions and kept secrets. Someone laughs at the wrong moments; words, and their meanings, get up to leave." - Tom Bailey, Editor of And Other Poems
"Susan Gordon Byron's The King's Liars is filled with strange and wonderful acts of creation and reclamation; from sinister figures with ivy for eyes, to the bodies of slain emperors, to Medusa's desire to be 'filthy, heavy, rotten' against the men she turns to stone. These poems translate the everyday as eldritch fable, in lines full of fresh-minted images and phrases. A truly original debut." - Jessica Traynor, Author of New Arcana, Bloodaxe Books
"Susan Gordan Byron's The King's Liars uses elliptical, intimate, and surreal language to take the reader on a journey: From Medusa, Virginia Woolf, the history of the face cream, to A Streetcar Named Desire, the "lyric I" destabilises and dazzles in various poetic forms. At the tug of private wars, possiibilities abound beyond shrinking in silence and smashing things on purpose. To long for something else without knowing what it is makes us all tourists: "It's your morning, too, yours a photogenic ripple". Amidst mundanity, insights do not preclude hope: "My favourite lie is the future / An unhandled punch of time / Sometimes called a daydream". This book is for those who "wandered out from under their eyes / and into the lane, coughing up ivy.'" - Tim Tim Cheng, Author of The Tattoo Collector, Nine Arches Press