Launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts & Arundhathi Subramaniam
Join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Gwyneth Lewis, Kate Potts and Arundhathi Subramaniam. All three poets will be celebrating the publication of our three new March titles by reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live and will be available below or here: https://youtube.com/live/JAN5q5XJlV4. 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 the time stated above. There may be a small delay in the event starting, but if it doesn’t show the livestream click on the play arrow until it does. For those who can't make it live, the event will be available on YouTube afterwards.
To receive reminder events about the event, you can register on TicketTailor here: https://buytickets.at/bloodaxebooks/1534704
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/JAN5q5XJlV4
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Gwyneth Lewis: First Rain in Paradise
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/first-rain-in-paradise-1367
Kate Potts: Pretenders
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/pretenders-1368
Arundhathi Subramaniam: The Gallery of Upside Down Women
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-gallery-of-upside-down-women-1371
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Gwyneth Lewis: First Rain in Paradise
First Rain in Paradise is a book about falling. Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive poems trace an interior landscape carved out by the trauma of childhood emotional abuse through subsequent chronic ill health and towards a hard-won resurrection. These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light.
This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence. The book opens with ‘Spiderings’, a gothic horror sequence about the effects of maternal abuse. Then comes a descent into underworlds of debasement and debility. The third, title sequence begins with a 15th-century manuscript depicting the fall of Adam and Eve, the poems presenting a portrait of a drenched, catastrophic landscape, asking how human trauma relates to a fantasy Eden.
Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and – most importantly – with joy.
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Kate Potts: Pretenders
In Pretenders, her third book of poetry, Kate Potts asks: what is it like, as a daily, lived experience, to feel like a fraud or a fake? And what can ‘the imposter phenomenon’ – a sense that our true abilities and achievements, and other core aspects of our identities, are unreal, undeserved or mistakenly bestowed – tell us about who we are and how we relate to one another?
Through lively and vivid poetic monologues drawn from original interview material, and through original poetry, Pretenders begins to consider individual feelings and experiences of fraudulence, pretence and persona in a wider social and historical context. The varied, hesitant, questing voices build to create a bold and innovative chorus. Pretenders shines a light on our value systems and hierarchies, interrogating notions of ‘realness’, self-assurance, and the self.
Kate Potts' Whichever Music was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first book-length collection, Pure Hustle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011, and followed by Feral, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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Arundhathi Subramaniam: The Gallery of Upside Down Women
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down. Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides.
Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.
Arundhathi Subramaniam has published five collections in India and three books with Bloodaxe in the UK including When God Is a Traveller (2014), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Love Without a Story (2020). Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009). She has published other books on Buddhism and spiritual figures.
[20 January 2025]
