Threat

Threat

Julia Webb

Price £9.99

ISBN: ISBN: 978-1-911027-62-1


Date:  30th May 2019

Format: Paperback

Extent: 80 pp

POETRY

BIC Code: DCF


Cover artwork by Natty Peterkin


The second collection by poet Julia Webb; forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small town lives seeps to the surface of these unsettling poems.


Threat  is a powerful and unsettling telling of how it feels to be a girl living in small town whose surfaces are seethed with graffiti, and home life bristles with disquiet.  A girl whose body grows into a woman’s shape and becomes instant prey to the lurkers in bars and those who snuffle the playgrounds with bags of hot chips.  Julia Webb’s voice here is magical realism at its most gritty, full of loss and longing. I found myself in these poems; know their streets and forest pathways and felt their dangers as a visceral ache.” – Helen Ivory


Threat is a collection which brilliantly manages to be both surreal and of the body; it’s a reminder that within the perfect metaphor can live a depth of truth that ordinary language might not be able to discover.  Threat knows how closely love and loss, comedy and tragedy, violence and sexuality can be bound together within the tight confines of a poem.” - Andrew McMillan


"In Julia Webb's audacious new collection the past is as claustrophobic as one of the cramped houses she so vividly describes, where families are cooped up together in dangerous proximity. Tensions simmer in poems of startling physicality, where the body’s desires and rages make their – sometimes brutal – presence felt. By turns horrifying, comic and tender, the poems crackle like a nylon sheet in the dark  – full of hair-raising energy. Highly recommended.” - Esther Morgan


 Download our Reading Guide to Threat here




Julia Webb grew up in Thetford, a small town in rural Norfolk. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Norwich University College of the Arts and an MA (poetry) from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Norwich where she teaches creative writing and is a poetry editor for Lighthouse, a journal for new writing.  In 2011 she won the Poetry Society’s Stanza competition. Her poem 'Sisters' was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prize. In 2016 she was writer in residence on Norwich Market. Her first collection, Bird Sisters, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016.


Photo  © Martin Figura


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Julia Webb’s Bird Sisters is a surreal journey through sisterhood and the world of the family via the natural world. Fascinated by the ‘otherness’ of things, her poems expose places and relationships that are not always entirely comfortable places to exist, often blurring the boundaries between fairy tale and reality.

 


Find out more about Bird Sisters

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