In May 2025 I published a new poetry collection, with Kingston University Press. Lungs is the result of many years of thinking and writing. As with The Bodleian and the Bottle Ovens, it also contains ‘visual poems’ — in this case collages of things in the shape of lungs. The collection contains words and objects that make me feel more real and alive, suggesting maybe we all create in order to breathe properly in the world.

The book is available from my shop, and also online and from all good bookshops.

‘In Ailsa Holland’s poignant, irreverent, dark, funny and deeply thoughtful collection, ‘Lungs’ are breath, breath is life, and life is colourful, messy, painful, joyous, filled with people and with aloneness, seasoned with love and grief. Dancing between the mundane and the transcendent, there are goddesses, there is birth and death and oh so many questions, with playful lung-inspired images giving us a moment to pause and catch our breaths. Holland calls a poem “the broken spoken”. Here it is not only spoken but sung, celebrated, breathed.’ (Tania Hershman)

‘Ailsa Holland knows that being a woman is ‘not for cissies’. Nor is it ‘a circus of paints/ and nails and lashes and heels and tucks,/ it’s just this body’. The cast of voices she assembles, from Ophelia to Mary Magdalene to Calliope to her dying mother know this too. It is about sex, salt, children, work, fatigue, bones and trilobites. To read it is to feel enlarged, capacious, full, not out, of breath. This is a book for everyone.’ (Anthony Wilson)

Earthed in our everyday experiences, sometimes angry, these poems exhale the broken and refuse despair. Between poems of fossil song, crying with laughter and fuckedupness, Ailsa’s photographs of lungs also sit; quietly crafted, these visual assemblages invite us to explore the materiality of respiration. Ink bottles of wasting time doodles and paired slices of bread play on symmetries of air sacs made from the very matter of her words. For those wanting to find straight-ahead ways of spending their time, you can keep your shiny stuff. For all imps and menopausal mermaids, bring a cuppa and feel the love. (Jules Sprake)