Speculatrix, [McCabe's] blazing, breakthrough fourth collection, explores the sleepless metropolis by Jacobean torchlight. Breathtaking verse combusts in dark Thames pubs where revenge-tragedy dramatists drink with hedge-fund managers.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times

Deliriously anachronistic, Speculatrix is an act of witness as much to modern London as the early modern plays that inspire it ... One of the most original contributions to British poetry in quite some time.
Dai George, Ambit

This is a book of mirroring, of artful repetitions and binary reversals: life and death, men and women, dark and light, fecundity and decay ... McCabe approaches the actualities of love, death and loss with a steady, unflinching eye.
Karen McCarthy Woolf, Poetry London

Bold, woozy and thrilling
John Canfield, Poetry School Book of the Year

Speculatrix is a book in perpetual motion, alive, dynamic, galvanised by its sources but not overwhelmed by them. It is a sublime work of artistry, unashamedly clever, eschewing the parameters apparently agreed by committee for poetry of directly lived experience and everyday language to produce a work of jacked up, febrile intensity.
Tom Jenks, The Wolf

McCabe’s suburban commuters are ‘the zòmbies of / ambition’ and, in this cadaverous updating of The Waste Land, suppurating fiscal and physical corruption take centre stage.
John Field, Poor Rude Lines

Speculatrix juggles language like he’s juggling knives, mixing contemporary urban scenes with Elizabethan and Jacobean references – sparks flying from the clashes and contrasts [...] These are complex, strange, boisterous and unsetlling poems.'
Mike Loveday, Magma

The formal constraints that McCabe uses... add to the sense of barely contained and conflicting energies: wealth and financial collapse, creativity and death, reality and play. This is a city on the verge of a riot it doesn’t really understand.
Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements

McCabe is a poet for modern times and Speculatrix – in its dark mechanical thrum – gets closer than any book to defining the cross-narrative, digital, consumerist, money-defined, zombified, alive world we inhabit.
Cadaverine Magazine

In this haunted work, history, tragedy and comedy roil in energised and dynamic engagement with language of the early modern period, bringing it confrontingly into the here and now through a lens of gender, the gaze fixed on the stage of the poem, intrigue, injustice and the city of London. The linguistic goalposts might shift, though the mouth might still speak 'Elizabethan', and the relationship between subject and object will still demand explication with the verbal tools at hand. This brilliant work taps into the materials of early modern theatre and problematises patriarchal impositions on the 'heritage' of language - not glibly, but with zeal and razor-sharp insight. The London riots, the machinery of capital and city, the failure of ideology, the undercurrent of revenge and deliverance, all warp in these frequently dialogic poems to reveal a theatre of the contemporary in which language is macabre, brutalised, and yet generating possibilities of insight into the condition of survival. A formalist in a fresh way, Chris McCabe's 'play-poems' are compactions of history and place, manifestations of the violent struggle for identity towards which many of us are impelled. This poetic work is long overdue. It's one we need.
John Kinsella

The apparatus of capital, sexual intrigue, notoriety and death, and the City of London echo through the taut and visceral musicality of the sonnets that are at the heart of Chris McCabe’s Speculatrix. This collection is one of the poetic highlights of 2014.
David Caddy, Tears in the Fence

As fast moving as quicksilver and as venomous as mercury ... these poems glow with the fire of inspiration—he is a torchbearer in the dark catacombs of poetry.
Valeria Melchioretto, Writers' Hub

In his splendid new collection, Chris McCabe merges the London of the Jacobean and Elizabethan stage with the here and now in language which spits and fizzes with a dark eloquence both demotic and high-art.
Steve Spence, Stride

The way each prose poem with its staggered spacing and accented syllables veers back and forth between the ages is a giddy-making experience but an exhilarating one too. This is what innovative poetry needs to do – scorch and tear at the boundaries of language in order to expose uncomfortable truths.
Josh Ekroy, London Grip