How I Did It: Forward Prizes – Desree on ‘Intruders’

Welcome to our Forward Prizes 2025 ’How I Did It’ series. This year we asked poets shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection to write about the inspiration behind one of the poems from their chosen collection. Here’s Desree on what inspired her to write the poem ‘Intruders’ in Altar.

The Prompt

The first version of this poem began in 2020 during a writing workshop with the Obsidian Foundation. The prompt was to think of a song that had moved us in some way, and I immediately thought of ‘INTRUDERS’ by Jessie Reyez. At the time, her album BEFORE LOVE CAME TO KILL US was on repeat for me and a few months after its release, she brought out an animated music video for the track.

At first, the song felt like it was speaking to a devotion to a partner. But the video shifted and expanded its meaning. The animation meant the lyrics now spoke on colonialism, power, and possession. The love, in this context, began to feel like something more complicated, more loaded.

You are my kingdom

I wrote your name

Everywhere

For all eyes to see

You’re beautiful, beautiful

I see them stare

But you belong to me

Reframing these words from a partner to a land immediately brought me to Anguilla, the place I have always called home. Anguilla, a small island in the Eastern Caribbean, is still a British Overseas Territory, which simply put, means it is under colonial rule. I found myself interrogating not only that reality, but also my own complicity. In being ‘Brit-ish’, I carry the privilege afforded to being born here and burden of that identity when calling somewhere else home. Calling Anguilla my home brings with it the weight of ownership and belonging, ideas I wanted to examine and became part of the tension I wanted to write into the poem.

The Hard Part

The biggest challenge was how to give context to Anguilla and its history of colonialism without losing the intimacy of the poem. Initially, I tried placing this context in an epigraph, but it felt detached as though it came from someone else’s voice; like someone else was speaking over me. It created distance, when what I was really trying to explore was my own personal relationship and, in some respects, my responsibility.

With the guidance of my editor, Amy Acre, we decided that these historical moments shouldn’t sit outside the poem as backstory. Instead, they needed to be woven through the piece, because they are not separate from my own perspective, they inform it. This shift meant I had to do more than simply reference facts. I had to confront them, respond to them, and engage with the personal implications of them.

In doing so, the process became less about recounting history and more about making myself vulnerable by confronting my own claims, scrutinising my idea of home and sense of connection to the island.

The Takeaway

For me, this poem doesn’t carry a neat message or a simple moral. It isn’t something you can package away and bring out when needed, it’s messy, unresolved, and in many ways unfinished. It’s not an answer, and maybe it’s not even a question.

What I really wanted was to put language to a feeling that has been sitting with me for a long time, and in doing so, start a conversation. It’s a feeling I think many of us who are second or third generation might recognise; the deep, sometimes complicated pull towards ‘home’ – the tension of holding that connection while also grappling with distance, identity, and belonging.

Desree is an award-winning writer, spoken word artist, educator and producer based in London and Slough. An alumna of Born: Free Writers Collective, Jerwood Arts and the Obsidian Foundation, Desree was Poet in Residence at Glastonbury Festival 2022 and Slough’s EMPOWORD. Her work has been broadcast on Sky Arts, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah; and published in JOY//US Poems of Queer Joy, Ink Sweat & Tears, Spoken Word London’s Anti-Hate Anthology and more. Desree’s debut poetry collection, Altar (2025, Bad Betty Press) is shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, Best First Collection Award.