Cath Nichols’s poetry collection This is Not a Stunt is built on a quietly radical premise: that living with disability or being trans is not a tragedy to be overcome, nor a narrative arc that demands redemption, heroism, or exceptional suffering. Instead, these poems insist on something far more subversive, the idea that such lives are simply ways of being, full of humour, romance, irritation, longing, boredom, love, and the slow accumulation of ordinary days. Nichols embraces both the mundane and the remarkable, reminding us that “We’re middle-aged, of course. Life rolls on,” and it is precisely this rolling on that gives the collection its emotional weight.
The book moves fluidly across time and place, revisiting Nichols’s childhood in New Zealand, her teenage years in Kent, and later decades spent on the gay scene in Manchester, complete with changing fashions, haircuts, and social codes. These shifts are not treated nostalgically or sentimentally, but as lived textures, moments that shape a self without needing to explain or justify it. The poems feel grounded in experience rather than theory, even when they are engaging with ideas that are politically and philosophically charged. Bodies, identities, and relationships are presented as processes rather than destinations, as acts of becoming rather than problems to be solved.
