Devour Everything
Sarah Stewart
Book of the Month: March 2026
Reviewed by Roshni Gallagher
Devour Everything is Sarah Stewart’s debut full-length poetry collection. She is also the author of several novels and the pamphlet Glisk (Tapsalteerie, 2018) which won the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. Threaded through with a gentle humour, Devour Everything is an assured collection that focuses on the body, memory, and the lives of women.
Writing about both mothers and motherhood, these poems hover in a space between creation and loss. Stewart writes about the significance of the everyday, and in the touching poem ‘Talking to my Mother About Clothes’, the speaker’s mother is able to remember outfits that she has worn throughout her life, and these clothes become ‘a language that can weather the collapse / of her fontal lobes’. Stewart writes:
When I fear I’ll go the same way
I think of the time we shopped together
in Aberdeen’s sprawling TK Maxx
warehouse of frills and flounces,
obscenity of clothes, absurdity of choice:
and we turned at the same time, metres apart,
both holding up the same plain white linen shirt.
This final image, and the near rhyme between same and plain, tenderly captures the simplicity and certainty of the connection between mother and daughter. In the third section of the book, the poem ‘The Charity Shops of Aberdeen’ revisits these themes. The speaker has inherited her mother’s keen eye for quality clothing, ‘anything real’ she writes, concluding ‘Isn’t this the truth of us; / the things we lust after?’
Other poems touch on pregnancy loss, and in ‘The Sonographer Sees the Complication’ the speaker sees that a woman has ‘conceived an asterism / a puzzle of rogue stars.’ These are poems that grapple with grief and the cruelty and mystery of the body with a light touch.
It’s no surprise, then, that surgery is a theme that runs throughout. In ‘Sylvia Plath as Heart Surgeon’ the titular Sylvia has ‘specialised in paediatric cardiology / […] after divorcing Ted’ and likes ‘the way it feels to palpate a tiny heart, the way / it feels to haul small souls back from the light.’ Perhaps poetry, like surgery, is a way of excavating and mending internal harm. Elsewhere in the collection surgical language mixes with the everyday and in ‘This is a True Story’ the menacing mother figure is imbued with an exacting intelligence as she ‘open[s] up Victoria sponge / like a neurosurgeon’.
Patriarchal violence is also a theme in many of these poems. One example is ‘Animal Magnetism’ which follows female somnambulists in 1825 who were abused by medical professionals. There is a textural quality to Stewart’s imagery that makes the poem unsettlingly vivid: ‘armpits darkening with sweat’, ‘Rain like lambswool / deadening the sound’, and the poem ends on a sinister second person address: ‘his hand is pressed upon your crown. / You can do nothing about it now.’
Throughout Devour Everything there is often the sense that Stewart is speaking directly to the reader. She captures the smallness of our individual lives while honouring the depth of emotion, tragedy, and splendour within them. ‘The village’, Stewart writes in ‘Mijas Pueblo’, ‘go[es] on without you, revolving / in its unremarkable remarkable way, […] / and the tethered animals / turn and sigh in their stalls.’
Devour Everything is published by Tapsalteerie
Roshni Gallagher is a poet from Leeds living in Edinburgh. Her debut collection Even the Trees is forthcoming with Bloodaxe Books in September 2026, and she was joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. She was the co-winner of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2022 and a recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2022. She has an MFA in creative writing, specialising in poetry, from the University of St Andrews.