People Who Like Meatballs

Selima Hill author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Published:27th Sep '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

People Who Like Meatballs cover

"People Who Like Meatballs" brings together two contrasting poem sequences about rejection by 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson). The title-sequence, "People Who Like Meatballs", is about a man's humiliation by a woman. Into my mother's snow-encrusted lap is about a dysfunctional mother-child relationship. Like all of Selima Hill's books, both sequences in "People Who Like Meatballs" chart 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

'Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry - Despite her thematic preoccupations, there's nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill's work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon - using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama - hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn - So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry - not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics' - Fiona Sampson, Guardian. 'Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine - Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets.

  • Short-listed for Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection 2012
  • Short-listed for Costa Poetry Award 2012

ISBN: 9781852249458

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 11mm

Weight: unknown

128 pages