Vanessa Macaulay’s work sits at the intersection of poetry, visual art, and AI-assisted composition, forming a coherent conceptual body rather than isolated tracks. Her songs prioritise atmosphere, image, and emotional precision over conventional commercial structure, aligning more with art-folk and literary music traditions. The integration of a unified visual language across releases strengthens the project’s identity, suggesting a deliberate and evolving artistic practice rather than casual experimentation.
https://t.co/OBwvNRrquQ
A first piece from a cycle I’ve been working on alongside Laurel in the Honey.
Experimenting with voice, rhythm, and repetition—letting the poems find another form.
EP to be released on Spotify May 2026
LAUREL IN THE HONEY — Vanessa Macaulay
From tidal estuaries to the underworld, these poems map a landscape where the body and the land are bound by the same laws: pressure, fracture, return.
Myth and memory converge in a sequence shaped by salt and time, where what is carried cannot be easily relinquished. The past does not resolve. It alters its form, re-enters, and insists.
Written with restraint and precision, Laurel in the Honey resists easy consolation.
It asks what remains when survival is no longer the question.
Laurel in the Honey
Vanessa Macaulay
"A devastating cartography of the silenced and the seen."
In Laurel in the Honey, the poet operates with a cold, lapidary precision, excavating the strata of a life lived beneath the weight of a long-dormant history. This is not a collection of recovery, but a collection of surveillance. Through the dual lenses of botanical toxicity and cardiac anatomy, these poems track the moment a carefully maintained "mask of merit" finally fractures, revealing the crude, butcher-like reality beneath the academic poise.
Moving from the stalled, circular rhythms of the Eddy to the "neural fire" of a memory under siege, the collection explores the high-stakes friction between non-recognition and forced intimacy. Here, mercy is not a softening, but a "sharp invitation"—a tactical maneuver by a heart that has developed its own collateral circulation to bypass the sites of old damage.
With shades of Anne Carson’s clinical myth-making and the visceral biology of Sylvia Plath, Laurel in the Honey offers a blistering study in metamorphosis. It is an autopsy of the "monster remembered" and a fierce reclamation of the pomegranate grove—proving that the most profound power lies in the quiet, absolute indifference of a witness who has already moved beyond the frame.
Laurel in the Honey
Vanessa Macaulay
In the aftermath of drought and betrayal, a voice emerges—sharp, unflinching, and spare.
Vanessa Macaulay’s debut chapbook maps the terrain of intimate violence with forensic precision: the salt that preserves and stings, the pinning of wings, the rivers that remember what the mind tries to erase.From the cracked-cup thirst of “A Dress of Salt” to the toxic preservation of “Laurel in the Honey”, from the cultural mask of a vyshyvanka turned predator’s shroud to the quiet reclamation of blood watering a pomegranate tree, these poems refuse silence. They weave classical myth—Persephone, Lethe, laurel and honey—with raw contemporary reckoning, turning personal wounds into something archetypal and enduring.Yet amid the severity there is breath: the wild, living surge of The Coastal Diptych, where mackerel run, dolphins harry, and women ease into a hidden tidal pool, reminding us that landscape can hold both threat and solace.Severe, economical, and quietly devastating, Laurel in the Honey is a book of damage documented and transmuted—testimony that becomes harvest.Published by Dark Shore Press, 2026.
Global geomagnetic activity index
The Kp index is a global geomagnetic activity index that measures disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field caused by solar wind and geomagnetic storms. It is based on 3-hour measurements from ground-based magnetometers around the world and is used to characterize the magnitude of geomagnetic storms. The Kp index ranges from 0 to 9, with higher values indicating greater geomagnetic activity and potential for auroras.