Sweetdark's Author Savannah Brown Beckons at i-D

Although Penguin Random House UK published her debut novel in 2016, Savannah Brown has taken an alternative approach with her poetry, self-publishing her second and most recent collection of poems, Sweetdark (2020). Jenna Mahale asks her about Sweetdark at i-D: "There has to be a story to the name Sweetdark. How did you land on that as a title?" Picking up with Brown's response: 

Poem to poem, I noticed that these made-up compound words kept appearing. I especially liked the idea of putting together two words that were almost but not exactly opposites. And [Sweetdark] is not "bittersweet". It's almost bittersweet, but not, and I think that aspect of it is a little bit unsettling.

I mean, the whole thing that Sweetdark is trying to say is about how different realities can exist alongside each other. And the sort of blurry intersections where one moment or feeling might begin, and another might end. So I was just playing around with different words that appeared in the text a lot, and seeing how they sounded together. And once Sweetdark came about, I was like, “Yeah, I think that's it. I think you just summed it up.” And I think it's quite fun to say!

Continue reading at i-D.