This book was as strange as it was beautiful. As a trans reader, I saw myself reflected in these pages in painful and aching ways. Giles' frustration, and reveling, in the trans experience, especially focused in the British trans experience, was refreshing and healing. I do wonder how this appears on page considering the sheer amount of overlapping lines and audio design in the audiobook, but Giles' narration of the poetry really gave the words a sense of rhythm and energy.

This poetry collection is wry, absurd but also razor sharp, and I highly recommend this as an audiobook, as Giles' delivery sells the clever intricacies going on within each line and word, as they explore identity, politics and safety.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of this book, in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed having the audiobook version of Them! It definitely gives a different sense of what things and which words matter most to the author/performer as she explores contemporary life for a trans woman. Overall, you get ths cool sense of different voices and energies throughout. There's anger and humour in an intensely "poetic" collection. I found the commentary on work and neo-liberalism hit me the most. Would definitely like to look at a print copy as I did miss some sections. However, she reads the collection with so much vivacity that I didn't mind. It's zesty and clever.

I particularly enjoyed the audiobook version of Them! Harry Josephine's intonation and use of tone is mesmerising. However, I would also love to see the print version - some parts felt so weighted in an aural production, that I can't imagine them on the page. As someone who is hard of hearing, I also feel I lost chunks of some sections through my confusion - particularly when there were multiple contrasting vocals at the same time. Likewise, my opinion of Them! fluctuated throughout the (one sitting, straight through with my headphones on) listening experience. At times, I got goosebumps, I audibly gasped, I cackled, I sucked air through my teeth, and I watched the hairs on my arms rise. But still, at other points, I was unable to interpret (and therefore connect with) what was being said - again, perhaps for me a print version would remedy this.
All in all, I found Them! to be a thought-provoking and affecting work, that veered from the soul exploring to the mundane effortlessly.

Them! is a new collection of poetry by Harry Josephine Giles, and the audiobook is read by Giles herself, making full use of audio editing to get across poetic repetition and layering. I usually read poetry on the page or hear it performed, and this was the first poetry audiobook I’ve listened to, and wow, was it one to begin with. The collection is packed full of wit and hard-hitting moments, moving between register and style to explore the modern world of work, technology, and nature, and life as a trans person in that world.

I’m already a big fan of Giles’ work, but Them! is so packed full of things that get to me, from references to vaporwave, the Pokemon Mew, and the game Hades, to powerful commentary about existing. Many of the earlier poems take their titles from words relating to transness and queerness and I really like how these all formed different conversations with each other. A stand-out poem for me is ‘The Reasonable People’, which plays with public discourse around trans people’s existence.

I often form opinions on poetry collections based on whether they inspire me to write poems myself, and Them! was bursting with inspiration for me, and felt like a breath of fresh air, both in style and subject matter. I can’t wait to get my hands on a print copy to read alongside the audio performance and to return to over and over whenever I need it.

Some of the poems I loved, they gave me goosebumps and were eerie others I didn’t really understand, could just be for me but some of it was too distracting