On days when your energy is low, steer clear of Girl, Ruth Padel’s freshly released poetry collection published by Chatto & Windus. This isn’t the kind of book offering simple girlhood positivity quotes with a bit of political posturing sprinkled in. Instead, it is packed with vivid imagery—little smiling footballs with wings, a bullman lost in fantasy corridors, a snake slithering up a moon-coloured arm, and Death herself draped in a red-gold shawl. Her poetry paints colliding worlds—a world hostile to women’s autonomy, alongside a kundalini goddess force rising through a girl’s spine.  

Padel’s poetry is work—crafted for deep engagement, asking for an investment of time, bandwidth and imagination, offering no room to coast, and embracing multiple themes within themes. Girl (128 pages, 46 poems) reflects the complexity brought to the fore by a poet-novelist-naturalist-scholar-wildlife advocate who seamlessly integrates her experiences across disciplines, geographies, and histories into a cohesive poetic narrative. Though born and based in London, her poetry spans diverse terrains. She has written about composer Beethoven and her great-great-grandfather, biologist Charles Darwin. In We Are All from Somewhere Else, she blends prose and poetry on the issue of migration. Her novels cover a wide range: one intertwines personal narrative with Holocaust history in Crete, another draws from her work in wildlife conservation in India.