Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
The Universe is an Animal
Jessica Mookherjee
Available to pre-order, this book will be dispatched close to publication date, 12/11/2026
ISBN: 9781916760523
eISBN: 9781916760530
Price: £11.99
Publication date: 12th November 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Territories: World
Extent: 72pp
DCF: Poetry Collections
In this time of seismic geopolitical and climatic change, to be human is to be faced with choices born of urges, desires and expectations – and personal decisions on whether or not to make more humans.
The Universe is an Animal by Jessica Mookherjee follows a woman’s journey through post-colonialism in the present, into an uncertain and ever-shifting universe of fears and dreams. These poems explore the fragility of a body facing the enormity of a future world and the human need for creation, resilience, and each other.
Praise for The Universe is an Animal:
'Jessica Mookherjee’s The Universe is an Animal is a remarkable collection: fierce, tender and endlessly curious. These are poems of inheritance, love, loss and survival, alive to both the intimate and the elemental. I loved it.' - Luke Wright
'In poems as delicate, yet resilient, as the charged imagery of waterlilies blooming throughout this collection, Jessica Mookherjee explores her universe as a living, breathing, entity. In The Universe is an Animal Mookherjee casts her ‘khol black eyes’ on histories and geographies, from pop culture and the minutia and into their global resonances. In this kaleidoscopic universe ‘women weave aches into strings / of marigolds’, bravery measured as a unit of DiCaprio wrestling with bears, and small plastic jewels fall into waiting laps. If there are fissures here, the partition of India, of matrilineal lines, leaving her native Bengal, from love and selfhood, there is hope too in reconnections in the taped-eyeglass of an adopted Welsh Grandfather, bus rides to reclamations, and the beat of indomitable animal spirits.' - Karen Downs-Barton
Jessica Mookherjee is a British poet of Bengali heritage and grew up in Wales and London, and now lives in Kent. She has been published in many journals and anthologies, and was twice highly commended for Best Single Poem in the Forward Prizes in 2017 and 2021. Author of three previous collections from Nine Arches Press, her second collection, Tigress, was shortlisted for the Ledbury Prize in 2021. She has two pamphlets, Playlists and Desire Lines with Broken Sleep Books. Jessica has a background in biological socio-ecology and public mental health. She also runs workshops and mentors poets.
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The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
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