Minx

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

'Don’t worry, I’m here in the house where every room has a name, but children’s names are often forgotten.'

Uplifting and heart-breaking, this lyrical evocation of a childhood on the edge of society marks the arrival of a vital new voice.

MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family: a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they’re taken into care, in a children’s home that forcibly separates them.

With a verve and playfulness that belies their pain, these poems explore what it means to belong. Through daring experiments with form and narrative, MINX captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.

© Karen Downs-Barton 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

u2018Like amber, these poems capture moments of time, place and feeling which otherwise would be unseen and ignored. How are we to survive our memories if they are not held like this? Every one of us who are writers must document our time in care and outside of it. I found Minx heartbreaking. Downs-Barton warns, u201cChildren who stay here become line drawings nobody / colours in.u201d Itu2019s a line I will never forget. There are moreu2019
Lemn Sissay, author of MY NAME IS WHY
u2018Minx is a splinter of a book, something that interrupts the body. It's a beautiful violence, each page a shock of poetry that renders an underclass family vivid. Rich, delicate, and brutal, Minx is essential reading, a constant companion. Read itu2019
Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto and Othered Poems
u2018Minx by Karen Downs-Barton is a work of linguistic and formal daring, a poetry collection that inhabits the liminal spaces of identity with precision and verve. Through its incisive engagement with the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller experience, the book interrogates cultural hybridity u2013 half one, half the other u2013 as both a fracture and a site of creative possibility. Downs-Bartonu2019s unflinching diction dismantles the structures of racism and cultural erasure while interrogating the complex legacies of belonging and inheritance. u201cI practise the language my grandparents spoke,u201d she writes, reanimating tradition as an act of resistance and renewal. Minx is a vital contribution to contemporary poetics, a text that challenges, witnesses, and transforms with every lineu2019
David Morley, author of The Invisible Gift
u2018In Minx language itself is a character. No, language is a cast of characters. No, language is impossible, chimerical, composite, exceeding the mouths that try to shape or frame it. In Anglo-Romani language u2013 and in Anglo-Romani identity u2013 the Anglo and the Romani do not meet, they collide. By assimilation and by exclusion, Romani becomes the violently disavowed undersong of English. Romani haunts English, troubling that unhomely home, making it strange to itself, willing it into miraculous and alarming new shapes. ... While anyone with eyes to read might marvel at Minx for its formally inventive engagement with language; its sheer lyric verve (and swerve), some of us will carry it with us, an incantation against all that besets us'
Fran Lock, author of White / Other
u2018Minx is a forceful collection that examines the intricacies of personhood, grief, and memory. These poems smoothly convey whatu2019s it like to live between languages and histories. With striking, imaginative power, the collection deftly portrays how we navigate the territories of longing, while also finding moments of beauty and solace in the most unexpected placesu2019
Romalyn Ante, author of AGIMAT
u2018Karen Downs-Barton, to paraphrase from one of her poems in this electrifying collection, is adept at u201cadapting roaming forms.u201d As fascinated by language as lineage, these poems tell an often harrowing tale of a Romani girl's experience of the Care System, the School system, the Foster System. The girl who was so often forced into clothes which were not hers captures the free spirit of rebellion, questioning stereotypes and prejudice along the way. Moving, magical, mesmerising, these poems stay with you long after the pages are closedu2019
Jackie Kay, author of May Day
'Her poems are fiercely imaginative, formally innovative, and always explore new territory in the most candid and wonderfully unexpected ways'
Ruth Padel, author of Girl
u2018Minx is a triumph: a mingling palaver of voices, a u201cswirling patrinu201d, a pattern bound by the force of Karen Downs-Barton's linguistic and narrative gifts. The systematic interlocking of state care, poverty and racial discrimination are brought into fresh, necessary light'
Will Harris, author of Brother Poems
'Courageous, haunting and exquisitely appliquu00e9d with the musicality of her own Romani identity, Downs-Barton examines a childhood traumatised by loss, poverty, sexism, and the brutality of the care home system. From the heart-rending u2018Of the Men who Came as Shadows in the Nightu2019 to u2018Arriving at the Home for Crying Childrenu2019, these are poems of anguish and questioning, poems gathered into a linguistic feast that will leave you breathless'
Sarah Wimbush, author of Strike
'These poems are breathtaking. [Didicoy] is wonderfully peopled, with an unforgettable portrait of a mother and a powerful and important depiction of life in a children's home. Writing like this, which combines real expressive skill with material which must be expressed, really reminds us what poetry is for'
Jonathan Edwards, author of My Family and Other Superheroes (on Didicoy)

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