Nine Arches Press
Adventures in poetry
Be Feared
Jane Burn
Cover art by Jane Burn
Price £9.99
ISBN: 978-1-913437-27-5
eISBN:
Date: 11th November 2021
Format: Paperback
Extent: 72 pp
POETRY
Jane Burn’s new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood, and love, encountering everything from Snow White and the morning song of chainsaws to myths, monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, moving from ‘beware!’ and ‘bereft’ towards a becoming – a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms.
Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn’s poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy-tale and folklore, invoke a divine carnival of sexuality and wild nature, and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.
About the cover:
"The cover art for Be Feared was painted specifically for this collection. It makes reference to the book’s themes - the heart for my own capacity to love, the bird for nature and concepts of freedom - also the bird looking towards the womb and sexual organs represents both sexuality and motherhood. I cover this region with a hand to represent uncertainty and fear. Gerda’s roses are there and the whole piece makes has both a folkloric feel and an iconographic feel (which also references the biblical feel of much of the book's language). The white light that passes through the figure's head is very much a reference to the poem 'Trepanation' (or what my life became when I let the ghouls out of my brain), the functioning of my own brain and the idea of thought and language passing constantly out of the mouth, or in reverse, though the mouth and out of the mind. It resembles also the speech bubble - should anyone want to know what she is saying, then please read the book, for that is where I have found my fluency. This is, I feel, an honest expression of my own neurodivergent art. Her expression is strange - inscrutable, discomfiting, not easily interpreted - such it is also with me." - Jane Burn
Jane Burn is a poet and illustrator based in the North East of England. She has won the Sliver Wyvern at the Poetry on the Lake Festival and first places in the Wirral, PENfro, Bailieborough and Wolverhampton Literary Festival Poetry Competitions. She is a working class bisexual with a late diagnosis of Autism. Her poems have appearted in The Rialto, Under The Radar, Iota, Butcher's Dog and Oxford English Journal and in anthologies including Writing Motherhood, #MeToo, Planet in Peril, Humanagerie, The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, and the Anthology of Illness. Her work has been nominated for the Forward and Pushcart Prize. In 2019, she co-edited Witches, Warriors, Workers, a volume of contemporary women's poetry and essays with Fran Lock for Culture Matters Press. Her illustrations have been used as covers for many books.
The Nine Arches Press blog features poems from many of our poets, as well as interviews and articles.
