A three-part collection of songs recalled 
and misremembered; of singing
or / as stilled life.

‘Hares on the Mountain’ [Roud Folk Song Index. 329] is a ballad of the emotional imagination; a classic of the ‘floating verse’ tradition that, initially logged as an Irish air by George Petrie as a melody alone (‘I neglected at the time to write [the song] down, and I have never since met with any one by whom it was remembered,’ 1902), is variously known as ‘Blackbirds and Thrushes,’ ‘Creeping and Crawling’ or ‘A Knife in the Window,’ amongst other variations.*
        The song parses a wound through a lens of creaturely re-visioning, in all its variants and mutations, to cocktail desire and threat—tenderness and fury—memory and change, and portray the inevitably lossy qualities of the felt. It tracks an effort to cloak a wound in image and in simile amidst the vines of vocabulary, consider avenues taken / untaken, and the scope and shape of an afterthought in the present tense.

An observational suite of airs obsessed with the act of looking and watching as a transformative play, Cassels’ Hares on the mountain examines the dealer’s hand to portray the habitually wounded. These poems are an active ‘watching’ of the wounded as she goes out and sets her stall for wounding in kind; and an effort to convey what she finds—or subsequently forges—in her finding. 
        Across three discrete chapters that aim their gun at affection as though a false phoenix—in ‘Kerosene,’ the first section of this volume—we’ve verses that commit to setting something on fire only to watch it burn down. ‘Cadences,’ the latter set of poems, are involved with sifting through consequent ashes, hunting for bone-fragments and other recollections purified through heat. In ‘Trance states,’ an interlude between the two, one longer poem re-traces the steps of a recurrent and hopeful summer.
        In a merger of tenses—of foresight, hindsight, and presentism—Hares on the mountain mimics the want and will of a song to walk, stroll, and wander—to drift in a leisurely and aimless way between contexts, whilst remembering and/or misremembering something of its true self as it travels—to observe the tidal drift of change engendered by climates and elements and objects in a landscape of good / bad emotions until the season is over, and the subject repairs itself to a new winter. 

Imogen Cassels is the author of Silk Work (Prototype, 2025) and the pamphlets Peach machine (The Last Books, 2025), Chesapeake (Distance No Object, 2021), VOSS (Legitimate Snack / Broken Sleep, 2020), Arcades (Sad Press, 2018) and Mother, beautiful things (Face Press, 2017). She lives in London.

Softcover, 95pp

Tenement Press, August 2026