Adventures in poetry
Price £9.99
ISBN: 978-1-911027-73-7
eISBN: 978-1-911027-75-1
Date: 26th Sept 2019
Format: Paperback
Extent: 80 pp
POETRY
BIC Code: DCF
Jacqueline Saphra follows her critically acclaimed, T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted All My Mad Mothers (2017) with Dad, Remember You Are Dead. A disturbing relationship lies at the core of poems that confront patriarchy, power and the male canon, and consider the damage dead men can inflict on living women.
These profoudly feminist poems bristle with terrors and tricksters, broken birds and groping hands, fists, myths and shadows - all the harsh lessons a man's world teaches to young girls and women. With their hidden teeth and piercing bite, Saphra's poems dare to confront both bthe wounds and woundedness of experience and survival, and joyously recalim their right to be dazzling, vulgar and outspoken. A remarkable collection of poetry that radiates a scorching, redemptive energy.
Praise for Dad, Remember You Are Dead:
'The purifying and cathartic fire of anger gives astonishing power to these poems as Saphra evokes her father with mordant wit and well-judged venomous analysis. To gain the distance necessary to write such visceral poems as these takes stamina and poetic intelligence; there is a superb use of form throughout, forging a conduit for emotions so raw, taut and explosive that the book might shatter into fragments without form’s stern control over this primal material.’ – Penelope Shuttle
‘Jacqueline Saphra’s Dad, Remember You Are Dead possesses the technical daring of Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap and the acerbic panache of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose. The world presented by Saphra is entirely her own, held together (sometimes blown apart!) by its Doctor Seussian rhythms, comic-strip diction, and the lushly alert textures of its ballads and sonnets. This is a very special and powerful poetry book.’ - David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award
“This collection is completely and utterly astonishing. I've never read something which carries such force and power, expressed with such rhythm, immediacy and precision. It shoots the reader right into the dark heart of rage. The poems emerge fully formed, thrown like knives, with exquisite exactness. Alive with detail, these lines writhe with loathing, grief and terror. A brilliant and career-best work, written with blazing honesty and consummate skill.” – Bidisha
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet and playwright. Her first collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye 2011) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women (The Emma Press 2017) won The Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. In 2017 A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller was published by Hercules Editions and her collection from Nine Arches Press, All My Mad Mothers, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize. Her most recent play, The Noises, funded by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and Arts Council England, will be produced at The Old Red Lion Theatre in April 2019. Jacqueline’s next collection, Dad, Remember You are Dead is due from Nine Arches Press in September 2019. She lives in London and teaches at The Poetry School. www.jacquelinesaphra.com
Jacqueline Saphra’s All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamorous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.