The Overview Effect
by Emily Wills
£12 (pub. 2026)

definition: 'First described by Frank White in 1987, the Overview Effect is the cognitive shift reported by some astronauts when viewing the earth from space.'


Praise for The Overview Effect:

"There is a wonderful story-telling nature to this book that brims with poems that are nostalgic at times without being sentimental, which take an ‘overview effect of the whole’, seeking to harness and capture the many chapters of a rich life, while looking on to the afterlife with hope, imagining the first green leaf on the moon. Wills is a fine observer with a mature wit and wry humour, as well as an often surprising but yet so accurate turn of phrase, from ‘marsh marigolds flourishing in renal dialysis’  to a rabbit’s ‘luxuriant ears protruding from convenient holes’, from the ‘varnished heartbreak of violins’ to the smallness of ‘the jarred, aborted, cherry’s heart’."  

Paul Stephenson

“As Ezra Pound had it, poetry is the news that stays news and The Overview Effect, Emily Wills’ marvellous third collection is just that – unflinching, tender, ruefully intelligent and richly detailed life studies that lift the heart.”

Michael Laskey

“In these wise, tender and profound poems, Emily Wills does indeed use her pen as ‘a scalpel of sorts’ to dissect the ‘intricate things’ of the past and present. Her experiences as a medical student and GP, together with life with an artist mother, whose work was described by a critic as selling ‘for the price of a hat’, imbue the poems with a feminist sensibility and ironic humour. There is a tremendous energy in Wills’s use of language. These are poems about noticing things, recording them and making the personal political. They are full of detail – an artist’s eye is at work here, together with the doctor’s desire for accuracy – perceptive details for the reader to revel in. Wills is an important poetic voice, full of humanity, intelligence and delight.”

Alicia Stubbersfield

Double Exposure

Somewhere in the Sahara, I guess
because of the camels, resting legless but still haughty
ungainly even without their burdens, the two of them
not seeing eye to eye but to a glance identical.

Beside them, two duller shapes, presumably bushes
perfectly adapted to survival, prickly and remarkable
only in such landscape of mirage and emptiness
and emerging from these

two figures, wrapped for discomfort,
awkwardly featureless, stuck on the lack of horizon
white sky bleached sand, too long ago to overhear
what they might be muttering to each other.

My father’s out of the picture, only one of him
harnessed to the bulk of a pre-war camera
and probably binoculars, and whatever he says
leached out in development, leaving only the other side

where he’s scrawled in triumphant biro Fliss times two!
and I wonder if it was then she realised she was only the first
was not to be my mother, and how she climbed back up
in all those skirts and veils, managed to ride on.

(from The Overview Effect)