Feeling All the Kills
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Liverpool University Press
Published:28th Apr '24
Should be back in stock very soon
Feeling All the Kills is a dazzling new collection that breaks the poet’s silence on what it means to experience and live in the wake of a violent assault and rape. Calcutt weaves stunning musicality with raw, unhindered storytelling, as the poems both collectively, and in their individual power, explore the distinctly connected, yet fractured selves of ‘sexual being’, ‘mother’ and ‘abused person’. Through the poems’ breathtaking and vital vocabulary Calcutt brings the physical, emotional, and sexual nuances of life to the foreground, with strength, subtlety and beauty, and courageously harnesses a sense of ownership over such a lasting trauma. At the heart of this collection is a personal desire to navigate a way back to a sensual, whole-feeling self, to shamelessly ‘feel all’ -- with authenticity and power.
‘Helen Calcutt’s Feeling All the Kills is radical, revolutionary, fearless in depicting women as sexual and maternal. These poems carefully record how women’s bodies can be dominated and controlled in the intimacy of the bedroom and the cold light of the hospital room when they give birth. This is something that we have to recover from, and these poems are extremely moving in mapping out that path from experiencing traumatic assault to opening to a lover, to one’s own child. Finding that closeness is life-altering, illuminating, astonishing: discovering the “quick light inside of me”. Calcutt’s poems have a descriptive power which illuminates a story that so many women will recognize and understand. How to trust and open up after violence. How to be autonomous and safe after violation. It is possible, these poems tell us: “I have become / my own hands holding. / My own eyes seeing
ISBN: 9781802074727
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
84 pages