Pascale Petit is known for her vast imaginative reach, sharp editor’s eye and consumate craftmanship. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is ‘a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo’s life and work’.

Pascale Petit on What the Water Gave Me for Open Notebooks from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

Listening to her read with the paintings projected behind her at the Old Horse Hospital in London last week, I was struck by just how integrated the paintings and the poems are — it was as if the paintings were speaking, not the poet or the artist. Pascale IS however speaking in this interview I had with her about her writing process, where she shares some early first drafts from a collection that was 10 years in the making.