Speculative Frequencies by Briony Hughes

"This Is A Commotion - I see an outline"

112pp Paperback

Published on 19/06/2025

ISBN 9781326442941

Available to purchase online here

In this invigorating new collection, Briony Hughes uses her experiences tracking bats through the Surrey Hills as a means to expand ‘communication’ beyond the human body.

The bat as a cultural figure is small, blind, nocturnal, and occasionally sinister, but in Hughes’ poems they become a medium through which to interrogate the most pressing issues of our time; what happens when we abandon concepts of human exceptionalism and see ourselves as animals existing with other animals within an ecosystem?

In a book of innovative engagements with language and visuality, Hughes explores the enmeshment of humanity within the natural world, and finds a moving kinship with these exceptional, easily overlooked creatures.

Briony Hughes is a poet and lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she leads the Poetry Pathway for the MA in Creative Writing.

She has published six books of poetry including June: A Haunting (2024) and Rhizomes (2023), while her monograph on Hydropoetics is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.

Her artist’s books have been collected by institutions including the National Poetry Library, Senate House, The Bodleian, and Kings College London Special Collections.

She runs Osmosis Press, and co-edits the Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine’s Poetry Feature.

Briony can be found across the internet via her linktree @brihughespoet

PRAISE FOR SPECULATIVE FREQUENCIES

Armed with an echolocator device, Hughes wrote these experimental and playful poems while listening to the sonar navigation of bats in the night sky. At moments she uses a typewriter and a language of tabs and pips to document these encounters. At other moments she writes a poetic field guide that like the bat sends signals into the dark and listens for what returns. Speculative Frequencies invites readers into a transcorporeal world where human and non-human merge in a haunting chorus of ecological reverence and joy.

JULIANA SPAHR

The connection is there; it has been all along, but the poet boils it to our surface, dear reader. This collection by Briony Hughes is a masterpiece in feeling the majesty of other creatures vibrating on our skin. Feel the tabbing tapping through a tooth! I love this book!”

CACONRAD

Where Nagel gave up on answering the question of what it is like to be a bat, Briony Hughes leans in. This is a poet who sound-sees, who turns the page into a night sky aflutter with creaturely life. Speculative Frequencies is at once an experimental field guide, playful eco-survey and love poem to the more-than-human world.

ISABEL GALLEYMORE

Think in diameters! 'Information must come to the intelligence from all the senses’ wrote Thomas A. Clark and this seemingly simple phrase speaks to what is happening in Briony Hughes’ Speculative Frequencies, her intelligent, sensual book of bats. Sound, as we might expect, is key, a tapping, tabbing, pipping, pitting, batting against the ear through the echolocator onto the retro typewriter, a human/machine/bat conversation that can never keep up but is suggestively, erotically, embodied onto the page a la Charles Olson and/or Maggie O’Sullivan. Other pages evoke the concrete works of Cobbing and Morgan in their repetitive play on key bat/habitat words: ‘Repeat until the poem staggers’. The antecedents are visible, but the work is quirkily original, and also funny especially when Hughes gets to the ‘Index’, the ‘information’ bit. It isn’t always clear who is speaking/listening and to whom in this work of shifty pronouns and thus the tentative, playful and mysterious air of the project is sustained throughout this speculative text.

HARRIET TARLO