#50 Imogen Cassels, writer

'a few coffee table books that have acquired second lives as coasters'

Imogen Cassels' debut collection, Silk Work, was published by Prototype in May, 2025. She's the author of various pamphlets, including Chesapeake, VOSS, Arcades, and Mother; beautiful things, as well as several essays and articles on Dylan Thomas, surrealism, translation, grief, and contemporary poetry. She lives in London. You can find her on Instagram.

Where do you write?
I wish I could say I write from my desk or have any kind of regular writing practice, but I don’t. I do have a desk, which I do various bits of professional work at, but I haven’t yet successfully transitioned to using it for more creative work. Poems mostly form in notes on my phone (and lines are often prompted when I’m walking and thinking or remembering), then eventually I’ll put everything together, generally onto my laptop, and inevitably from my bed. So, as well as the photos of my desk, I’ve also included a photo of the wall next to my bed. There’s a few shelves with my to-read pile; a copy of Holly Pester’s Common Rest; and a canvas by the artist Theo Hall, who graciously allowed me to use his work as a cover for one of my pamphlets. Then, stuck on the wall there’s a line from Colossians about putting on love; two miniature prints showing the same view of Stanage Edge in midsummer and midwinter; and dangling by their side is a metal milagro, a traditional Mexican skeleton that you put up to ask for miracles.

What can we always find on your desk?
A half-empty mug, assorted abandoned lighters, used matches, a few coffee table books that have acquired second lives as coasters. Some kind of biscuit.

What's that we hear on the speakers?
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Adrianne Lenker. Otherwise, a lot of music from the folk tradition — Martin Simpson, Bert Jansch and all the millions of covers of his songs, Anne Briggs, June Tabor, Martha Tilston, Kate Rusby. I’ve been listening to folk quite intently since I was twelve or so, so it has this wonderful quality of familiarity to me, at the same time as the well-worn words can always suddenly become strange and new again, in unfamiliar versions.

Perfect bookshop to hide on a rainy day?
The LRB bookshop has pretty much everything worth having, including the best in-house poetry expert you could find anywhere. It’s financially ruinous.

What’s your most treasured book?
I have a couple of first editions of some of Dylan Thomas’s works, though I’m probably more attached to the cheap 1970s Everyman copy of Under Milk Wood that I found in Oxfam as a teenager. My mother’s grandmother, who I never met, had a copy of A Christmas Carol which she re-read every Christmas; I feel very lucky to have that on my shelves, too.

Dream writing location?
I’ve been lucky enough to go on a couple of Arvon retreats, and the set-up they create there is pretty ideal: a huge house, open spaces, books to read, countryside to wander in, kitchens to cook together in, other people to talk to, but only if you want.

One poem that has changed your life:
I heard Emily Berry’s Short Guide to Corseting read aloud when I was 16 or so; I’ve been thinking about it ever since.