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Product Description Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize • Longlisted for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award“Devastating and lyrical.” —The New York Times“Suspenseful and affecting.” —The New YorkerFrom the celebrated poet behind bone, a collection of poems that tells a story of coming-of-age, uncovering the cruelty and beauty of the world, going under, and finding redemption Through her signature sharp, searing poems, this is the story of Yrsa Daley-Ward and all the things that happened. “Even the terrible things. And God, there were terrible things.” It’s about her childhood in the northwest of England with her beautiful, careworn mother Marcia; the man formerly known as Dad (half fun, half frightening); and her little brother Roo, who sees things written in the stars.It’s also about the surreal magic of adolescence, about growing up and discovering the power and fear of sexuality, about pitch-gray days of pills and powder and connection. It’s about damage and pain, but also joy. With raw intensity and shocking honesty, The Terrible is a collection of poems that tells the story of what it means to lose yourself and find your voice.“You may not run away from the thing that you are because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you breathe.” Review Longlisted for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award“Devastating and lyrical.”—The New York Times“Though her plainspokenness resembles Rupi Kaur’s accessibility, Daley-Ward has a specific story to tell, one that is suspenseful and affecting in its details.”—The New Yorker“A coming-of-age memoir . . . of particular lyricism and bracing honesty.”—The New York Times Book Review“A few months ago, I thought I lost my love for reading. I spent weeks putting books down after a few pages. Nothing spoke to me. Then one magical day, I stumbled on The Terrible. . . . Daley-Ward’s beautiful prose wrapped its hands around my neck—I found myself doing stupid things like walking through New York at rush hour with my nose buried in her book.” —Jamal Jordan, The New York Times Book Review (New & Noteworthy)Elle’s Best Books to Read This Summer“Profoundly beautiful . . . [Daley-Ward] interweaves verse and prose to great effect, offering less a simple retelling of her life, and more of an impression of it, a sense of how it must feel to live it. Much of what Daley-Ward recounts of her childhood is devastating . . . and she has a unique ability to tell these parts of her life with an unflinching intensity, the kind that sears itself onto your skin; and yet this is not a story without hope or love.”—Nylon (Great Books To Read This Summer)“I tore through Yrsa Daley-Ward’s poetic memoir, The Terrible, in a matter of hours. . . . An impressive take on the memoir that prioritizes emotion over event.”—The Paris Review (Staff Picks)“Absolutely stunning . . . a poetic look at someone's life.”—Lauren Christensen, CBS This Morning“[Yrsa Daley-Ward] makes the emotional brutality of dealing with family, adolescence, addiction, and sexuality accessible to her readers. . . . She continually incorporates gut-wrenching imagery in her work, and in both bone and The Terrible, she packages heightened emotion into just one or two lines.”—Ploughshares“Unflinching . . . The Terrible’s raw yet lilting prose draws the reader in at once. Unpredictable shifts in form and structure—from prose to poetry and script—are refreshingly disorientating. This is both a defiant book and a defiantly inventive one.”—The Times Literary Supplement(London)“Open up the first page of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s genre-defying memoir, and you’ll find yourself immediately transfixed by her rhythmic language. Ward unspools the story of her difficult coming-of-age as it felt, foregoing the pacing of a conventional memoir for something more poetic and visceral . . . in this book, her unique voice has room to grow roots on the page.”—Refinery29 (Best Books Of June 2018)“Devastating, in the very best way . . . generous, utterly human, and, eventually, hopeful.”—Buzz