Bigger On The Inside
Kate Fox, Smokestack, £7.99

BIGGER On The Inside has its roots in a spoken word show and addresses neuro-diversity, principally autism and ADHD with precision, warmth and some humour. In this way, it’s both personal — Kate Fox has an autism diagnosis — and universal. It takes its title from a Doctor Who quote about women being “bigger on the inside,” as of course is the great Doctor’s home The Tardis.

I’ve seen Kate Fox live; she’s funny, clever and likeable, and it’s obvious she has spent enough time doing live shows to know what audiences like. So live, she delivers in spades. But not having read much of her work “on the page,” I wasn’t sure what to expect. 

I needn’t have worried. Witness from the title poem: “White space speaks/ while the fonts stay quiet./ I called the counselling group women/ midwives of silence/ because they let words/ hang in the air”.
    
And later in the same piece, addressing live performance from the poet’s point of view:
“The stories we tell and hear/ will abide/ to make us bigger on the inside.”

After the initial poem, the collection turns deeply personal where she bares her soul under a microscope’s lens, by quoting experiences that can only be moments from her own life — when and exactly why “K” left home, how she felt throughout it all etc.

Talking of microscopic lenses, have you ever come across a more succinct exploration of neurodiversity and the finding of coping strategies than this? “If you don’t know how to play the game you’re in/ or even that you’re in one/ you’re free to find another way to win,/ or at least, become a magnet”.

In less skilful hands this divulging of potentially uncomfortable truths could be an uncomfortable or even embarrassing read. Kate Fox though possesses as much warmth and charm with a typewriter as she does with a live audience. After reading it through, I just wanted to reread it, think about my own levels of ignorance (too many for comfort) and read it again — which I’m doing right now.

The structure of the collection is helpful. There’s a timeline and sections of prose “setting the scene” as such, followed of course by the poetry, bringing to life how all this stuff feels — which is after all the job of poetry.

Meanwhile, cropping up regularly both in the timeline and all over the brutally honest poems is the reassuring figure of the good Doctor, as often as not accompanied by the author’s trademark humour. This, from Turn Left, my personal favourite in the book: “I’m not saying I make bad relationship decisions/ but when I was sixteen/ I lost my virginity 
to a 46-year-old gunrunner”.

Going on to outline her own relationship with … well, relationships, she writes: “Before it returned in 2005,/ there was no sex in the Whoniverse,/ despite Peri’s low-cut tops For The Dads./ So, what was worse,/ I had to go by my undeveloped internal compass,/ Cosmo’s advice page,/ social norms in the era of the Spice Girls and Jimmy Savile/ and make do.”

As a poet myself, I’m painfully aware that I have a love/hate relationship with poetry collections. I’ve always been the same. But I loved this one, and look forward to seeing if her story contains a happy ending. Hope so.