"I loved this series of short encounters between buildings, people, politics, class and money, and the accounts here of how built structures arrange our emotional lives. Alternating between melancholy and awe, the language is curt but complex, the tone is elegiac but never sentimental, angry without being hectoring - intimate and monumental."
- OWEN HATHERLEY
"Stay Awhile begins with the following provocation: 'It's like, you built this. You don't just get to say I quit and start again'. In which context the title might be read as an invitation, a dare, or as a powerful injunction. It also proposes a model of reading: a deep, sustained attention that is seldom afforded to working-class spaces. Or, for that matter, to their inhabitants. To read is to cross a threshold, to enter and to navigate the structures - architectural, social, and linguistic - that neoliberal culture would infinitely prefer to forget, or to 'quit'.
Unsworth is a poet admirably without quit; a superb noticer in urgent and sensitised communion with her environment. What these poems demand an
