Know Thy Audience by Nadia de Vries Alice Oswald authoritarian brutality

authoritarian brutality

Written in the form of a personal diary

they are tender and grotesque

’ New Statesman

Know Thy Audience by Nadia de Vries Alice Oswald authoritarian brutalityKnow Thy Audience, Nadia de Vries's third poetry collection, disavows the platitude from which it takes its name and makes the reader complicit in both her aggression and her submission, sparked by a history of domestic abuse that escapes all euphemism and metaphor but not poetry altogether. Speaking or rather, singing as a 'battered woman' from a working class neighborhood, De Vries' aphoristic writing belies a vengeful reversal of roles in which the