This brilliantly devised verse-novel opens with a love affair in crisis, unfolds through loss, risk and existential challenge, and ends with lovemaking in a domain at once sensual and imagined. Such radical ambiguity invites us to experience the lovers' dilemmas as our own: is true intimacy only possible through distance? How much of our identity is just story?

Exploring the limits of meaning, Sampson refreshes our sense of poetry as that which goes beyond the grammar of the commonplace. Profoundly influenced by the poet's work in the mainstream of European poetry, The Distance Between Us is a passionate exploration of psychology and sexuality set among the tensions of contemporary European identity.

"Superb. Perfectly balancing remoter imaginative and intellectual perspectives with a richness of earthy, ordinary detail."
Poetry Review

"These poems are linguistic tours de force [which] point up the extraordinary versatility of Sampson's language."
Poetry London

"Sampson is working on the very outer edges of language here, seeking for the truths that emerge at the instant when syntax, vocabulary and even the shape of words on the page dissolves..."
Sarah Crown, The Guardian

Fiona Sampson has published ten books, including four collections of poetry, philosophy of language and books on the writing process; she is also the Founder-Editor of Orient Express. She has won many awards, including the Zlaten Prsten of Macedonia, and been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is the Editor of Poetry Review.