Launch reading by Jen Campbell, Courtney Conrad and Nicole Sealey
Jen Campbell, Courtney Conrad and Nicole Sealey launched their new poetry collections at Bloodaxe's live-streamed launch event on Tuesday 19 September 2023. All three poets read live and discussed their new collections with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe poet John Challis. Courtney Conrad's pamphlet I Am Evidence is published as the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition, judged by Imtiaz Dharker.
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOWG0Q2foA
We are very grateful to John Challis for stepping in at the last moment to host this event. His first full collection The Resurrectionists was published by Bloodaxe in June 2021.
The event includes a tribute to the poet Gboyega Odubanjo, who tragically died in late August of this year. Courtney Conrad reads Gboyega's poem 'John 19:27' at the beginning of her first set. Gboyega's friends and family have launched the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers, and a link to donate to the fund in his memory can be found here.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links. If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
Jen Campbell: Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit-1328
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/please-do-not-touch-this-exhibit/
Courtney Conrad: I Am Evidence
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/i-am-evidence-1337
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/i-am-evidence/
Nicole Sealey: The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-ferguson-report-an-erasure-1330
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/the-ferguson-report-an-erasure/
Nicole Sealey: Ordinary Beast
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/ordinary-beast-1329
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/ordinary-beast/
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Jen Campbell: Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit
Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF.
Jen Campbell grew up by the sea in the northeast of England. She is an award-winning poet and bestselling author of twelve books for adults and children. Her first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2019. It was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category). She won the Spelt Poetry Competition 2022 for her poem ‘The Hospital Is Not My House’ from her second collection, Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She currently lives in London.
Two poems from the collection are featured on Bookanista here, introduced by Jen Campbell.
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Courtney Conrad: I Am Evidence
Courtney Conrad’s powerful work interrogates the tensions within Caribbean migration, gender-based violence and national politics. Migrating from Kingston as a teenager, she is unflinching in her attempts to capture the vibrancy and violence of her experiences in both the UK and Jamaica. Her poetry draws together subversive diasporic imagery, national political commentary and shatteringly personal narrative in its exacting response to the political corruption and violence she witnessed as a young girl in Jamaica in the wake of its colonial subjugation under the British Empire. The themes of her work stretch across state- and gender-based violence, religion, raw bodily introspection and lush cultural memorabilia that reimagines the warmth and blood of both her homes.
Courtney Conrad is a Jamaican poet who now lives in London. Her debut pamphlet I Am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books/Mslexia, 2023) was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition judged by Imtiaz Dharker, and includes some work which won her an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. She received a Bridport Prize Young Writer Award in 2021. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award’s Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition.
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Nicole Sealey
A poet of existential magnitude, deep intellect and playful subversion, America’s Nicole Sealey writes poems that are restless in their empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.
Nicole Sealey was born in St Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, US, 2017; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023), which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Alfred A. Knopf, US, & Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2023). Sealey served as the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017 to 2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University. In 2017, she started The Sealey Challenge, an annual online community challenge to read one book of poetry each day for the month of August.
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
In August 2014, Michael Brown – a young, unarmed Black man – was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. What followed was a period of protests and turmoil, culminating in an extensive report that was filed by the Department of Justice detailing biased policing and court practices in the city. It is a document that exposes the racist policies and procedures that have become commonplace – from disproportionate arrest rates to flagrant violence directed at the Black community. It is a report that remains as disheartening as it is damning
Now, award-winning poet Nicole Sealey revisits the investigation in a book that redacts the report, an act of erasure that reimagines the original text as it strips it away. While the full document is visible in the background – weighing heavily on the language Sealey has preserved – it gives shape and disturbing context to what remains.
Nicole Sealey won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021 with an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, earning the judges’ praise for creating ‘new moments of lyrical beauty and contemplation’ out of ‘stifling obfuscations’ to shine ‘a light on all that the report tries to hide’, with Shivanee Ramlochan calling it ‘a poem of resonant cultural and social value’.
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure is published by Knopf in the US and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. Nicole Sealey’s first collection, Ordinary Beast (2017), is published in the UK by Bloodaxe at the same time.
A review of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure can be read in The Guardian here.
Ordinary Beast
The ranging scope of enquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast – at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential – is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.
[06 September 2023]
