A daring and beautifully crafted debut collection about the experience of abortion – from an emerging poet and winner of the Northern Writers’ Award
'Amelia Loulli stakes out fresh imaginative territory'
JACOB POLLEY, author of Jackself
'Painful, brave and steadfastly honest'
ANDREW MCMILLAN, author of Physical
Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words 'I'm going to tell you what happened', and that is precisely what she does:
If our mothers could see us now corridors of girls lifting legs like candles
to the stirrups
One in three women in Britain will have an abortion by the time they are forty-five. For such a common procedure it still carries social stigma, and has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry - not, at least, until now. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience: surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world.
Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book - provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.