This changes things / Claire Askew.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Askew, Claire, 1986- author.

Contributor:

David Milne Fund.

Standardized Title:

Poems. Selections

Language:

English

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

71 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Northumberland : Bloodaxe Books, 2016.

Summary:

This changes things is Claire Askew's first full collection, coming after years of work in Scotland's flourishing poetry and spoken word scene. Her poems focus on the lives and experiences of women - particularly the socially or economically marginalised - at pains both to empathise and to recognise the limits of this empathy. They embody a need to acknowledge and challenge the poet's privileged position as documenter and outsider, a responsibility to the poem's political message and to that message's human subject. This changes things draws much of its strength from this exploration of inbetweenness. Claire Askew's purposeful deployment of objects, lighting effects and liminal spaces implicates her reader in the poem's argument, holds up a mirror and asks us to pay attention. The book's romantic relationships, depictions of frustrated travel or social mobility, are bound up in its awareness of the systems of power that permit no true state of innocence. Even the final poem, 'Hydra' - with its celebration of the body and its senses - cannot ultimately allow us off the hook. This changes things unsettles the homely and recognisable. In its compromised, imperfect characters and narratives, it proposes a-radical way of translating neoliberal Britain. Book jacket.

Contents:

Dukkha 9

I

I'm sorry I'm still in love with my grandmother 12

Big heat 13

Anne Askew's ashes 15

Hometown 16

High school 17

The lucky little girls 19

Catalogue of my grandmother's sayings 21

To Wakefield 22

Visiting Nannie Gray 23

Frank 24

Spitfires 26

Going next 27

Thing about death 29

Poltergeistrix 31

The minister sees the monster 33

Picker 34

Onion 36

Privilege 101 37

Fire Comes 39

II

The axe of the house 43

I Hacksaw and burn 43

II In the dream 44

III Deafening 45

IV Mary tells you about the break-in 46

V Housewarming 47

VI The axe 48

Rescue industry 49

Royal Mile, the day after the vote 50

Seefew steading 51

Orcas Island 52

Highway: Skagit County, WA 53

Greyhound, Seattle to San Francisco 54

The western night 56

Parisian hostel 58

Witch 60

Barcelona diptych 62

The picture in your mind when you speak of whores 64

Mothership 65

Bad moon 67

Stephen in Waitrose 68

Hydra 69.

Notes:

Poems.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the David Milne Fund.

ISBN:

9781780372761

1780372760

OCLC:

920740313

Publisher Number:

99969013472