Recent Work

Almost, with Tenderness (Out-Spoken Press, 2025)

Wasafiri Sub(VERSE)ive series interview on the pamphlet

‘Almost, with Tenderness is a reckoning with the unspoken. With this debut pamphlet, Maya Caspari offers us glimpses of beauty and devastation in her lyric exploration of a family lost in time. A stunning new voice.’ — Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

‘Maya Caspari's Almost, with Tenderness offers a true poetics of intimacy. To read these fantastically textured yet accessible poems is to become immersed in a breathable, humming environment. Forget about "show, don't tell"; here we're mid-story, inside "feel, don't say". It's always possible that things might turn out otherwise. How did it happen that far-flung elders met and fell in love? Hot-moaning boats balance out taciturn children. Tenderness manifests, both surreal and hyperreal. Will domestic Morse code go undeciphered? Foals may sing in this city collection that teems with life that closes in, that holds, that distances: businessmen, lizards, red peppers, museum cases. Caspari doesn't shy away from the topics of migration, domestic violence, and vampiric bureaucracy. The era of 'lone genius' poetry seems far-distant from this volume, where family is a given, yet never taken for granted. Caspari's work will ease you into the most lovable negotiations, but it will never 'settle'. This is brilliant. ‘ — Anthony V. Capildeo

‘An accomplished debut […] deliberate and exacting work’ The Poetry Review

‘Maya Caspari’s Almost, with Tenderness delves deep into a grammar of intimacy. It strikes a deftly achieved balance between what is articulated and what is withheld in subtle lyric narratives that speak of family, love and loss.’ Michael Marks awards

’Ideas of contingency, preservation, and intimacy spill throughout Maya Caspari’s Almost, with Tenderness’ Oxford Poetry

‘surreal liquidity’ Art Review

’[T]he year’s best [debuts] shared a vein of tragicomic surrealism - there in […] Maya Caspari’s Almost, with Tenderness’ TLS

‘An assured, intelligent debut pamphlet from a writer who shows her curiosity and her acuity of observation with every word’ Victoria Spires

 
 
 
 

Academic Articles

‘Subjunctive Remembering; Contingent Resistance: Katja Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther’, in Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990 (edited by J. Skolnik, E. Gezen, & P. Layne), Berghahn Books.

'Moving archives, touch, and world literary melancholy in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2023 [2020]