Susan Wicks's Singing Underwater was awarded the Aldeburgh Festival Prize for Best First Book of Poems of 1992. Sean O'Brien, in the Sunday Times, described it as 'astringent and surprising', while John Forth, analysing its mixture of qualities in the London Magazine, spoke of 'poems which hop across spaces you don't know you're missing until it's too late, or put out a sudden pleasurable probe which might be a sting'.

Open Diagnosis takes it author into riskier and more intimate territory. Its central section forms a narrative which concerns her own brush with serious illness.