Zara+-+4.jpg
ac-funding-literature-ke-rgb-black.png
ACNI_LF_Logo_Horizontal__Black_RGB.jpg
DFAT_Standard_Black.png
Zara+-+4.jpg
ac-funding-literature-ke-rgb-black.png
ACNI_LF_Logo_Horizontal__Black_RGB.jpg
DFAT_Standard_Black.png

The Standard Pre-Order

£15.99

Zara Meadows’ debut, The Standard, is an unapologetic interrogation of place and parlance. Embedded in, yet beyond Belfast’s Shankill Road, the poems’ environments are both identifiable and hallucinatory; inherited myth is de-familiarised, the quotidian elevated to myth. Abrupt syntactic inversions, images that startle and defy, play across an underlying throb of violence; parallel vulnerabilities surface as injured animals, cuts, burns, scars, diseased human lungs.

Conjuring potential transitions, Meadows rejects linguistic pigeon-holes of register, of Standard English, deconstructing imprimaturs of tribe and supplanting them with an idiom that transcends social categories. This, all underpinned by a whetted humour that excises nostalgia and the complacency that ‘loves echo chambers right now’.

This publication is generously supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland, and the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Note: This is a pre-order purchase. The book will be shipped to you following publication.

Zara Meadows’ debut, The Standard, is an unapologetic interrogation of place and parlance. Embedded in, yet beyond Belfast’s Shankill Road, the poems’ environments are both identifiable and hallucinatory; inherited myth is de-familiarised, the quotidian elevated to myth. Abrupt syntactic inversions, images that startle and defy, play across an underlying throb of violence; parallel vulnerabilities surface as injured animals, cuts, burns, scars, diseased human lungs.

Conjuring potential transitions, Meadows rejects linguistic pigeon-holes of register, of Standard English, deconstructing imprimaturs of tribe and supplanting them with an idiom that transcends social categories. This, all underpinned by a whetted humour that excises nostalgia and the complacency that ‘loves echo chambers right now’.

This publication is generously supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland, and the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Note: This is a pre-order purchase. The book will be shipped to you following publication.

About the Author:

Zara Meadows is a writer from the Greater Shankill area of Belfast. Their debut pamphlet, The End of Art, was published by fourteen poems in 2025, and their poetry has appeared in Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, Magma, Banshee, Catflap, and elsewhere. In 2026 they received the inaugural Loretta Brennan Glucksman Literary Award for emerging Irish writers who have shown exceptional promise and potential. They are currently working on a critical-creative AHRC-funded PhD at The Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast on ekphrastic poetry, and their first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming in 2027 with Macha Press.

Publisher: Macha Press

Date Published:

Paperback:

ISBN: