Launch reading by Dzifa Benson, Nia Davies and Helen Ivory
Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Dzifa Benson, Nia Davies and Helen Ivory, celebrating the publication of our new October titles. All three poets will be reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/YC7FU3LpFTY.
Please note that you will not be joining on Zoom, so you should not worry about logging in on Zoom. No log-in is needed. You just need to go to the YouTube page at 7pm BST.
Register for the event via TicketTailor here: https://buytickets.at/bloodaxebooks/1382317. If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards via the same YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/YC7FU3LpFTY.
If you miss the registration deadline, you can still watch live on this page or via the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links (available via the Bloodaxe website from early October). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin.
Dzifa Benson: Monster
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/monster-1357
Nia Davies: Votive Mess
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/votive-mess-1356
Helen Ivory: Constructing a Witch
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/constructing-a-witch-1355
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Dzifa Benson: Monster
Monster is a bold and lyrical exploration of the Black female body as a site of oppression and resistance. At its heart is a brilliantly imagined study of the world of Sarah Baartman, aka the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was displayed in freak shows in 19th-century Europe. In her multi-faceted, highly inventive title-sequence Dzifa Benson frames Baartman’s voice within the social, political and legal structures of the day.
Other poems draw clear parallels with Benson’s own experience as a Black woman born in London but raised in Ghana who returned to the UK at the age of 18. The collection is an exciting mix of vivid lyricism, sometimes laced with dark humour, using complex poetry, monologue and theatrical devices. The influence of Shakespeare sits comfortably with references to Ewe mythology and history in a collection of wide scope and depth. This is a highly accomplished first collection by a mature voice. One of a small group of published Black women poets, Benson makes a major contribution to current British poetry with the publication of Monster.
'This is an amazing collection, not only for a debut but for a poet at any stage. It’s versatile and virtuosic, experimental and moving, complex and culturally important.' – Bernardine Evaristo
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Nia Davies: Votive Mess
In Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. Nia Davies begins to learn a lost mother tongue, y iaith Gymraeg, and presents unfinished experiments in liminality.
Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. There are love letters drowsy and excessive as well as uncanny happenings on stage and in the woods.
Votive Mess is composed out of a tangle of sex, leaf, stumbles on stage, damage, blackberries and dyslexia. There is a discharge of Awen, otherwise known as poesis. The navel of the dream is inside out.
Nia Davies' first full-length collection, All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
‘In a collection that straddles buoyancy and hesitancy, Davies courts the pleasures, mishaps and undersides of languages. Welsh, English, action, gesture, food, land, bodies, water and desire become itinerant strata in a terpsichorean poetics of intimacy. Polyphonic jouissance.’ – Amy McCauley on Votive Mess
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Helen Ivory: Constructing a Witch
Despite the Devil being conceived to direct human baseness away from our goodly selves, there has always been sin in the world. The Bible has it that woman is the weaker vessel, therefore her inferior ways could easily let the Devil into the house, and into her oh so corruptible body – and thus the story begins.
Helen Ivory’s sixth collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. The witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.
These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems of Constructing a Witch Helen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries.
'Helen Ivory, a highly individualistic poet and visual artist, conjures a world that is both magical and sharply real. As in freshly conceived fairy tales, everything is transmutable. She expresses the intrinsic strangenesses of life, and makes a brilliant contribution to female empowerment through poems that are disturbing, agile, and visually telling.' – Moniza Alvi, Cholmondeley Award co-judge
[18 September 2024]
