Sophie Mayer

Biographical note:  Sophie Mayer is a writer and educator. She has studied and taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto, and been part of the poetry performance and publication scenes in both of those fabulous cities. She writes regularly for Sight and Sound, Plan B and Vertigo about film, and for The F-Word and Shebytches about women and culture, as well as blogging as deliriumslibrarian about the multiple worlds of literature. She is a Commissioning Editor at queer literary magazine Chroma and one of the “new lyric poets” included in Andy Brown’s anthology The Allotment (Stride, 2006). Currently based in London, she is the author of The Cinema of Sally Potter: The Poetics of Performance (Wallflower, 2008) and You Are Never Alone, a play set in the Buffyverse, which will be staged at the Playbox Theatre, Warwick, in 2009.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715619
ISBN:  9781844715619
Author:  Sophie Mayer
Title:  The Private Parts of Girls
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jul-11
Extent:  80pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  The Private Parts of Girls mixes up fairy tales and pop culture to tell smart, sassy stories from the dreamlife of girls: think Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Jo Shapcott. Punks, dreamers, mermaids, prophets and warrior-brides speak in puns, riddles and kisses direct to the reader’s heart.

Main description:  The Private Parts of Girls follows Alice down the rabbit hole, Kassandra onto Agamemnon’s boat, and Red Riding Hood into the forest: it conjures the most mysterious landscape of all, the mind of a girl – a girl who might be a dancer, a warrior-bride, a transatlantic traveller, the Messiah, sick of being compared to Sylvia Plath, airborne, born in space, or lost in a sunlit field, discovering love. From Battlestar Galactica to The Clash, the poems mix tart, smart pop culture goodies into the dreamspace of fairy tales, as they take us on a journey – hallucinatory with culture lag – through the mind and body of a modern girl. This is poetry for Buffy fans (and Twilight haters), for readers who grew up with Angela Chase’s voice-over for their lives and Air’s soundtrack for The Virgin Suicides on their iPods, for everyone who ever wondered if Beauty secretly was the Beast.

Table of contents:
Contents
Trial Proof for The Blue Feet (Kiki Smith)
Easter Parade
God and After
Previously on Battlestar Galactica
( )
The Doctor’s Daughter
A Brief History of the Deeleybopper in the English Language
she/said
What the Pink Book Said
Sappho’s Cookbook
Shucking
The Fourth Fuck
Sic In Transit
Found Object
Of Other Spaces (Tate St. Ives)
Aphelion
You Are the Weather
Bathysphere
Medusa Sets Sail
A face cache de la lune
Trois Couleurs
The Cantor’s Daughter
Contes
Belle est la bete
On Being Dismissed as ‘Plathlike’
On my Mother’s Side
Self-Portrait as my Imaginary Brother
Horticulture
WOOD / brown warrior
God Parts
FIRE / white warrior
Alkestis
WATER / blue warrior
Sur l’escalier
METAL / steel warrior
Queen of Swords
EARTH / green warrior
Sleepwalking / Guns of Granada (Double A-side)

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (549 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Self-Portrait as my Imaginary Brother

after Anselm Kiefer, Star Fall

And when I dare
it is against a playground

scarred with past drops.
Scunnered. In the whipcrack

of skull on skull,
bone at bone. Foul.

Call it. Weather moving in
from his bleak side. Kicking up

a tempest, thunder to run
the stars aground, shake them

like breath after the puffing out
of rage: dissipated

into spit and heat and harm
done. Clumsy. And so it glows, gold

of my cracked flesh. These inchings.
This stillness

as my feet plank through, my hands
distended. Too stubborn

to catch the stars (and they are
falling), I leave myself

open to them. I leave myself
to them. They leave me open.

Previous review quote:  [Mayer's] non-sequiteurs arrest you by their very strangeness, then draw you into a sensory chain where they seem just… true. Brilliantly disconcerting.

Luke Kennard

Previous review quote:  Full of zest, variety and intellectual ambition. There is no such thing as a typical Mayer poem, diversity being her great strength. Dazzling.

Jane Holland

Previous review quote:  Sensual and vivid, exploded erotic imagery rewrites the love poem in new terms, reinvigorating our restrained and anecdotal poetic moment.

Wayne Burrows