This week's Friday Poems is 'The Romantic' by Katrina Naomi from her collection The Way the Crocodile Taught Me. Katrina recently won first place in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize with her poem 'in the kelp forest'. Watch the winner announcement and listen to a recording of Katrina's poem on the Keats-Shelly Association website.

This cover shows an illustration of a woman in 1950s style dress and a crocodile head standing with her hands in the air.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about a quick-tempered stepfather – a 17-stone brute, "mostly in a temper", and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother.

The Romantic After my father left, I grew a battery of hearts, felt each of them beat, like doves in a casket before their release. You might imagine the sheen of the good heart. I rarely picture the razor wire heart, its zest and sting. If I say my hearts have never been broken, or fissured, or ruptured, that's not entirely true. Still, I want my faults intact. And the barbs of the heart that loved my father jut as if from a pike's lower lip, the war of rust leaking; a child's heart, no larger than a grenade.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Katrina's most recent collection Wild Persistence is also available on the Seren website: £9.99

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