Him Hymn is Challenger’s first book of poems. Published on November 25th, 2025 by Osmosis Press. The event Painted Love and the Launch of Him Hymn was held at The Hunterian Gallery on March 19th, 2026 and was the first official launch of the book.
“Tamsyn Challenger’s H I M H Y M N is a striking debut—bold, intimate, and full of unexpected turns. Her poems move between tenderness and tension, exploring the body, art, and desire with sharp intelligence and dark humour. Challenger dismantles power and pleasure, turning language into both weapon and salve. This collection speaks to love’s violence and art’s necessity.”
“Any map of heartbreak can only be a version or representation of the territory, but this almost impossible task is also the soul of what poetry is. In Him Hymn we find a sensibility, an imagination, a voice, as real as any other world, urgently leveraging a dazzling spectrum of approaches to see what works, to see what breaks things open or describes them with the necessary emotional, cartographic accuracy. In Stein-like linguistic intensity Challenger gives us one of the most true maps I can imagine.”
“Him Hymn gives shape to the anger and obsession that come with impossible love. These poems are confronting, gorgeous and wild. When you read them, you’ll hear songs. Tamsyn Challenger knows exactly to which rhythm a broken heart beats.”
Reviews for ‘Him Hymn’:
“Artist Tamsyn Challenger recently emerged as a sharp and boldly original poet. You can see three inter-disciplinary film poems on her website, and she has just published a first volume poetry - 'Him Hymn' (Osmosis press). As you might expect, there are some visual art connections. The cover features a version of Ary Scheffer's 'Francesca da Rimini' (Wallace Collection, 1835) as re-imagined in a linocut by the book's editor, Briony Hughes. And one of the poems refers to James Gillray's satirical hand-coloured etching
'Fashionable Contrasts; - or - the Duchess's little shoe yielding to the magnitude of the Duke's foot', 1792. That notoriously presents the tinily exquisite diamond-ornamented shoes of Frederica, eldest daughter of the King of Prussia, in an evidently conjugal contrast with the enlarged feet of her new husband, George Ill's son Frederick, Duke of York. Challenger uses that as the starting point to compare the handling of a fine print with the speaker's lover bringing her to orgasm - delivering the high tariff combination of erotic charge and innovative language without running into the problems of tone all-too-easily inherent in such content.”
- Paul Carey Kent
A snippet of Tamsyn Challenger reading ‘Rain of Gold’ at the Painted Love/Him Hymn Launch event at The Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow on the 19th March, 2026