In this episode, Claire chats to poet Jai Michelle Louissen about her collection The Weight of Vapour.
In The Weight of Vapour, Jai Michelle conjures a haunting mosaic of the Scottish highlands, animating its landscapes with an unsettling intimacy. Louissen's verses are a vivid collision of memory and myth, capturing the trauma in a language as lush and piercing as the wilderness itself.
The Weight of Vapour stands as a powerful exploration of loss, identity, and the eternal cycle of renewal. The chapbook will leave you irrevocably altered. Louissen’s voice is unflinching and transformative. She delves deep into the marrow of existence, where each line is an encounter with the primal forces of life and death.
Jai Michelle Louissen is a Scottish writer, living on the coastal fringe of the Netherlands. She is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and a recording artist, releasing two studio albums of her music and singing. She is also a survivor of childhood trauma. With an education in literature and in systemic therapy and family and nature constellations, she likes to write about trauma, loss and identity infused with Scottish landscapes, eco poetic portals into protoceltic animist cultures or intimate encounters in nature closer to home.
Her poetry, prose poems and microfiction are to be found most recently in Poetry Scotland, Dust Poetry, Acropolis Journal, Dreich, Black Cat Poetry Press, Crow & Cross Keys and The Heron Tree.
She is the author of two chapbooks
'A Vision of Orchids' by Sunday Mornings by The River in 2022
'The Weight of Vapour' by Alien Buddha Press in 2024
She is the Founder and EIC of a literary magazine, online and in print, The Winged Moon. She frames the ethos of the magazine within a love of folklore and a flair for incredible art.
A well-known poet who inspires her is Lydia Harris and she read out Harris´ poem “we find a slow worm the day I meet the man I-hope-to-marry’s family for the first time”.
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