Fantastic Voyage

In this tender and wryly humorous poetry collection, a child travels down her own oesophagus, a woman joins a search party to look for herself, one grief-stricken soul descends into a watery underworld whilst another experiences love as demonic possession....

In Fantastic Voyage, Amanda Dalton takes us on journeys into our hidden and ghostly selves, our insides and our ’other’, exploring the myriad ways in which the human body gives voice to unspeakable truths. These poems put us in and alongside bodies that are ill, out of control and inhabited - our dark innards as harbingers of secrets and fears, the gut as fortune-teller and home to ghosts.

Taking inspiration from sources as disparate as human anatomy and classic 1960s science fiction, this collection charts a deeply personal voyage through grief and loss.

Amanda Dalton is a poet and playwright. Her debut How to Disappear was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was followed by Stray in 2012. SmithDoorstop published a pamphlet of two long poems, Notes on Water, in 2022, which was re-created for two voices and soundscape for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears, and is now included in Fantastic Voyage, her third book-length book of poetry. Amanda writes extensively for BBC Radio 4 and 3 including original drama, poetry-dramas, classic adaptations, re-imaginings of film, and lyric essays. Her theatre writing includes text for outdoor and site-specific performance, and drama for young people including commissions with Manchester’s Royal Exchange, Sheffield Theatres and Keswick’s Theatre By The Lake.