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The Usual Apologies
Sadie Maskery’s The Usual Apologies, a collection of vignettes of daily life in Scotland, is part of our 2025 in-house chapbook series.
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The book is available on Amazon.
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Reviews
Always a proper poet.
The Usual Apologies is loaded with treasure and midnight snacks.
Jeanie deMullet
Sadie Maskery has no need to apologise for this collection: an unabashed and elegantly-constructed fun house where the mundane becomes bizarre before mutating into inescapably honest, where pain overlaps belief and reflects reality with both words and experimental visual collages.
Memory and imagination hide under the bed, as the reader time travels between what might be memoir but what is a unique and highly enjoyable journey around the poet’s brain space.
There’s the moon on a stick, expressionist angst, practical brilliance and really, something for everyone, if you’re willing to accept the challenge these poems present.
S. Reeson, Flammable Solid
In a culture where so much lyric poetry seems to want to distance the authorial “I” from the reader, Sadie Maskery’s The Usual Apologies takes you by the hand, leads you into a corner of a pub, buys you a whisky and ginger (with an alcopop chaser), and makes you laugh and cry in equal measure.
Maskery is a keen observer of the personal, with a brilliant eye for detail, and many of the poems read like overheard conversations and moments translated into affecting (and very funny) anecdotes. There is something of Paul Muldoon in her unaffected, say what you mean delivery, combined with early Jarvis Cocker’s cool world-weariness, and something that is all her own which makes her one of my favourite ever poets.
It takes real skill to make the unbeautiful, beautiful, but Maskery does that in so many of the poems: the collection opener, Preloved, is the perfect example of her enviable ability to combine humour, sadness, poignancy, and love.
The pairing of the photos with the text is perfect and something more collections should emulate. Everything in this book is something more collections should emulate.
Sam Szanto, This Was Your Mother
Review Copies
To review the book for your publication or blog, please email us at info@ogre.red and we’d be happy to send along a free PDF review copy.
About the Author
Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea.
We previously published Sadie’s art in Issue 16, February 2023.
Museum-quality prints are available via our ArtPal gallery.
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