Visions, by Flora Leask Arizpe

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

"In Visions, I explore the difficulty of being in-between: between languages, identities, art and science, rationality and dreams, here and there. In this collection I try to fit my real life experiences with what I was being taught during my university degree, resulting in a strange mish-mash of everyday surreality and logic. The first prose poem 'The Alchemist' deals with these themes while also adding a feminist perspective, and seeing how that changes previously entrenched ideas of science and philosophy- as well as the domestic.

The first two parts of the book, 'Dreams' and 'Science' express this experimentation between extremes of rationality and lived experience, while the third 'Miscellaneous' section shows the balance that I eventually found in going 'post-category'. In these last poems, which I wrote a few years later, I allow myself to embrace the surreal possibilities of poetry without having to side with any previously existing framework of how to see the world.

Visions is also love letter to the idea of 'hidden knowledge'. Inspired by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Isabel Allende, the idea of situations for which there is no explanation has always fascinated me. The chapbook owed a lot to my love of fantasy, science fiction and philosophy, as well as magical realism. Other influences include histories of real life humans who believed in magic and how they ended up, folk stories, and my time living in Scotland and Mexico."

-Flora Leask Arizpe

Flora Leask Arizpe is an undergraduate at University of Edinburgh, studying English Literature and Philosophy. Although she grew up in Glasgow, she takes a lot of inspiration from her countries of dual heritage, Scotland and Mexico. Flora writes poetry and short stories, and has been published in a number of online and print publications. She also makes paper cuttings, a hobby picked up in lockdown with her mum. She is part of the Barcelona/UK art collective known as Age of Concern.