Rachel Carney

Rachel Carney is a poet, creative writing tutor and academic based in Cardiff. Her debut poetry collection, Octopus Mind, explores themes of perception, creativity, and neurodiversity, and was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023.

Rachel wrote this about these poems:

As we grow up, childhood memories, stories and poems become entangled with the way our bodies interact with the world. I have been seeking new methods through which to explore the impact of neurodivergent experience or chronic illness on my own experience of time: through interruption, disruption, or the unwanted expansion of space. These poems were intended to evoke two very different experiences in very different locations, but they both seem to circle around that sense of altered or disrupted time.