Rachael Allen is a young artist who uses her contemporary surroundings, one of her works reflects trending social media topics, like memes from the website 4chan.

Allen presents her works in many forms. She is the poetry editor for ‘Granta’ and co-editor of independent poetry press ‘Clinic’ and the online journal ‘Tender’. A pamphlet of her poems was published as part of the Faber New Poets series, and her first collection will be published by Faber in 2019. She has been published in various magazines and won multiple awards, such as an Eric Gregory award and New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse award.

In-jokes and popular references are her weapon of choice to convey universal life experiences that are sceptical and funny one moment, and profound and moving the next. Her musings move to the paper using casual speech, but her words are never straightforward. Like Allen explains: ‘You can attempt to explicate bits of a poem, but I don’t think you can ever say what a poem’s totally about.’

Rather, she seems to use poetry as a way to avoid tying her ponderings and daily impressions to singular topics. Her poem ‘Many Birds Roast’, for example, is the result of her wondering about the role of animals in our lives. We eat them, yet we love watching them act cute in YouTube videos – ‘I don’t see this poem as about veganism, I don’t know what it’s about. When I wrote it I was considering where animals sit in our society and how they exist.’