Drawing on her own experience, Evans’s astonishing new collection Drunken Driving is a sonnet sequence set primarily in the radiography lab of Pentonville Prison in London in the mid-1990s. It is fuelled by a careening, rule-agnostic narrative drive that befits its menacing title. Among the most extraordinary things about the book is that – aptly for an X-ray technician – it can see right through entire systems of poetic prestige and penal judgment… an acutely personal story that continues Martina Evans’s lit-match look at the combustible fluid in the heart.
Greg Londe, The Irish Times
This electrifying sequel to Evans’s 2023 sonnet sequence The Coming Thing…pumped up with adrenaline, fuelled by alcohol, and peppered with razor-sharp observations, it reads like Porridge on steroids.
Philip Terry, The Guardian
