Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie
Broken Sleep Books
Published 28th February 2026.
Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie is a collection steeped in metamorphosis, haunting, and quiet resistance. Drawing on myth, the gothic, and the occult, Pattie explores the thresholds between madness and recovery, body and landscape, self and spectral other. Her verse is richly imagistic and finely wrought, moving through poems-as-incantations, narratives of possession, and shapeshifting lyric forms. Whether invoking foxes, gorgons, or isolation tanks, the poems assert a lucid, unsettled presence, offering neither resolution nor retreat, but a deepened sense of psychic and poetic agency.
PRAISE for Bertha Comes Down:
Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie is an astonishing collection of poems which jolted their electricity through me as I read. The passionate, poignant and impactful collection comes at you with power and unflinching truth from the very outset. Lines like “…you do not turn around /in your madness and walk / out of it…” communicate a strength and self-knowledge of a poet looking back, in amongst and forward from issues with mental health.
The collection is filled with stop-you-in-your-tracks brilliance. It is a mouthfeel of well-planned rhyme and half rhyme, of rhythm and music, of consonance and assonance. It is gorgeous and rich in its language and lush with startling imagery speaking so eloquently of the body and the mind – tidal, urgent, and breathless one moment, shapeshifting into nature, then mythical and incantatory in another, then dark, measured and deeply thoughtful in the next. Moments of recognition often occur. Line like “As women will, /I dissolved into the walls” resonate greatly, and poetry is the means Pattie has chosen to write herself back into existence.
The poems move between weights – from air light to complex and dense, with Pattie artfully slipping in and out through the lines between. The poet looks both inwards and outwards – Pattie writes, “so shall you know yourself /unfurling boldly.” This is a poet doing exactly that, bringing themselves to life through an amazing, enthralling, exquisitely painful yet positive, well-crafted series of poems which I thoroughly enjoyed reading.
— Jane Burn
In the shadows of these poems, Bertha, the presiding spirt, kindles fierce little fires that might galvanize a pale beast to life or burn down whatever house has wronged her. Bertha Comes Down is a book of transformations; a living grimoire with a gothic heart, bright as jet.
— Helen Ivory
Nobody writes like Megan Pattie. Bertha Comes Down is a deeply affecting and utterly shattering collection that came to me at the moment I needed it most. This poet blends an effortless mist of gothic with her signature flare for a stirring and savage emotional pulse. In a single word, this body of work is breathtaking, and everyone should read it.
— Lucy Rose
This is a bestiary, a spell book, a scream and a guide book to the underworld of the hurts that haunt us now. You will want to follow Bertha down into this beautifully crafted world and go ‘hunting in the brine’ - there you’ll find a language, an utterance for all the wanting, breaking, losing and becoming that happens under the surface we call self.
— Carmen Marcus
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