[3][4] In 1999, she won the Geoffrey Dearmer Memorial Prize and Poetry Review’s new poet of the year award.
Her poems have been published in, among others, The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Herald (Glasgow), The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, Poetry Review, The Times Higher Education Supplement and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in many anthologies.
Crown described the collection as charting ‘the reel and plunge of the year [Wardle] spent in a psychiatric facility receiving treatment for bipolar disorder’.
She noted that the collection contained 'poems of deep introspection, in which manic episodes, escape attempts and the baffling helplessness of incarceration are examined with agonised honesty'.
She concluded that 'for the most part, these are convincing poems, delivered with a tight formality that echoes the strictures under which Wardle found herself, while at the same time providing her with a means of control over a terrifyingly ungovernable situation'.