Ramona Herdman reviews Creature Without Building for Sphinx:

Strikethrough

I’ve read individual poems that make use of the strikethrough before, but never a collection that uses it so consistently to explore hesitation, power and permission around language.

In my reading, several of the poems here are written in a transmasculine voice, with the strikethrough used on words that relate to the assumption of others that the speaker is/was female, as in ‘Woman in waiting (or so they thought)’:

6ft they said,
cake-batter thighs,
a woman in waiting.

Read full review here

“Creature Without Building is a striking debut publication from Ray Vincent-Mills, a poet of exceptional skill and tenacity. The subtle – at times surreal – imagery only serves to underscore the fragmentation of identity provoked by hostile and challenging contemporary cultural politics. At the same time, the poems contained within are laced through with the rawness of lived experience and the precision of authentic observation. In their work, Vincent-Mills offers readers a lens through which to appraise and re-appraise their own complicity in the construction of a social fabric that so often excludes what it should enfold. I exhort readers to keep their eyes peeled for Vincent-Mills, whose star is sure to keep on rising.” 

Jack McGowan