BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Publication Date: 15-Jul-11 | ISBN: 9781844715619 | Trim Size: 198 x 129 mm | Extent: 80pp | Format: Paperback

UK Distribution:   | USA Distribution:   | Publishing Status: Active

SYNOPSIS

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.

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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)

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS

“[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

“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

“Sensual and vivid, exploded erotic imagery rewrites the love poem in new terms, reinvigorating our restrained and anecdotal poetic moment.” —Wayne Burrows

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Sophie Mayer teaches creative writing at King’s College, London. Her publications include Her Various Scalpels and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love. She is a Commissioning Editor at Chroma and Contributing Editor at Hand + Star, and regular contributor to Horizon Review and Sight & Sound.