Jenna Clake interviewed on Southword Poetry Podcast
‘Filled with strawberry-flavoured images and sunset-coloured scenes, the poems in Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream are luminous and funny, yet aching with painful secrets. Who can resist a title like ‘Self-portrait as a pink dressing-room’ or ‘Oyster Delight’?’ – Phoebe Power, Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 2021)
Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes, and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying: public and private jars of peanut butter, a tray of lemons, unfurling chocolate bar wrappers. In turning to television, childhood films, and social media accounts, her collection investigates how to reveal and conceal, what it means to have a secret, to be intimate, to navigate something that should be natural, but feels sickly, sour, and wrong.
Museum of Ice Cream is Jenna Clake’s second collection, following her debut Fortune Cookie (2017), winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, which was also shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award. She lectures at Teesside University and lives in Newcastle. Her debut novel Disturbance will be published by Trapeze (UK) and Norton (US) in 2023.
PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH JENNA CLAKE
Southword Poetry Podcast, online 29 August 2022
Jenna Clake was interviewed for the new Southword Poetry Podcast from Munster Literature Centre in Ireland. She was in conversation with host Sarah Byrne and read seven poems from her second collection Museum of Ice Cream.
‘Jenna Clake's debut collection of poetry Fortune Cookie won the Melita Hume prize in 2016, and was published in 2017 by Eyewear. It received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2018, and was shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award in the same year. Her second collection Museum of Ice Cream was published by Bloodaxe in 2021. Her debut novel Disturbance will be published by Trapeze (UK) and Norton (US) in 2023.’
Southword Poetry Podcast, online 29 August 2022
Jenna Clake was interviewed for the new Southword Poetry Podcast from Munster Literature Centre in Ireland. She was in conversation with host Sarah Byrne and read seven poems from her second collection Museum of Ice Cream.
‘Jenna Clake's debut collection of poetry Fortune Cookie won the Melita Hume prize in 2016, and was published in 2017 by Eyewear. It received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2018, and was shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award in the same year. Her second collection Museum of Ice Cream was published by Bloodaxe in 2021. Her debut novel Disturbance will be published by Trapeze (UK) and Norton (US) in 2023.’
Listen via Spotify here.
POETRY BOOKS OF THE YEAR COVERAGE
Poetry News, Best Books of the Year chosen by Poetry News contributors, Winter 2021 (also online December 2021)
‘Filled with strawberry-flavoured images and sunset-coloured scenes, the poems in Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream are luminous and funny, yet aching with painful secrets. Who can resist a title like ‘Self-portrait as a pink dressing-room’ or ‘Oyster Delight’?’ – Phoebe Power, Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 2021)
Read the full feature here.
Tristram Fane Saunders chose Museum of Ice Cream for his feature best new poetry books to buy for Christmas in The Telegraph of 20 November 2021. See his poem feature below.
Register to read for free online at The Telegraph here.
REVIEW COVERAGE
Read a review in the Times Literary Supplement here.
'Clake’s poems have a combative sensuality, exposing readers unapologetically to the mulch on the tongue, the bloat in the gut. There is a complex process at work here; the conflicting preoccupations associated with food are communicated through a tissue of precise images, often deployed in hectic, enjambed lines.' - Phoebe Walker, Times Literary Supplement
‘I’d strongly recommend Jenna Clake’s new collection, Museum of Ice Cream, which explores how the demands of the modern world intensify and add complexity to troubled relationships with food. These poems feel fresh, personal and vivid and are always involving and memorable.’ - Will Mackie, New Writing North (New Poetry for the North, Summer 2021)
POEM FEATURES
The Telegraph, Poem of the Week, Saturday 28 August 2021
'Like other women' from Jenna Clake’s second collection Museum of Ice Cream was featured in The Telegraph of 28 August 2021.
‘Her style – a surface of prosy, deadpan absurdism, with darker currents underneath – owes something to the late American poet James Tate…’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, Poem of the Week, The Telegraph
In print, and online in the Telegraph Culture Newsletter of Thursday 2 September 2021
Bookanista, online 19 April 2021
Three poems from Jenna Clake’s second collection Museum of Ice Cream were featured on Bookanista ahead of her joint launch with Dom Bury and Tishani Doshi on 20 April.
The featured poems were ‘Immersive experience of all the things I want (that are bad for me)’, ‘How much longer until I get this out?’ and ‘I hid a fish in my pocket and forgot about it for days’.
Read the feature on Bookanista here.
International live-streamed launch event, 20 April 2021
This international launch reading by Dom Bury, Jenna Clake and Tishani Doshi celebrating the publication of their new poetry collections was live streamed on 20 April 2021. It is now available on YouTube - see below.
Owing to the time difference, Tishani Doshi's two readings and her discussion with Dom Bury were prerecorded at her home in India. Dom Bury joined live from Devon, and Jenna Clake from Newcastle upon Tyne, with editor Neil Astley hosting from his home in Northumberland. Their readings were followed by a separate live discussion between Dom and Jenna.
Jenna reads first in each set, followed by Dom, then Tishani.
[01 September 2022]
