Sidewinder

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough returns with a fierce, luminous exploration of power, desire and survival.

Sidewinder is a poetic memoir that traces a relationship which begins as fascination and descends into coercion. Through a sequence of vivid, cinematic poems, Sennitt Clough examines the illusion of agency — how teenage girls believe they are choosing, when in truth they are being chosen.

Set against the soundtrack and grit of 1990s Britain, these poems chart a young woman’s entanglement with an older man who exerts control through charisma, myth and manipulation. As the voice matures, the collection becomes an act of recovery: a reckoning with what was taken, and what can be reclaimed through language.

Sennitt Clough writes with devastating precision and lyrical courage, transforming trauma into testimony. Sidewinder unflinchingly exposes the intersections of gender, class and power, and asks how we make sense of experience when the story we were told was never ours to begin with.

A haunting and necessary book, Sidewinder confirms Elisabeth Sennitt Clough as one of the most important poetic voices of her generation.

Praise for Previous Work

‘Rachael Allen describes a collection which ‘is a haunting’, whilst John Greening terms it ‘almost a verse novel’. I’m uncertain where the parameters lie, but in this Fenland Gothic tale, Elisabeth Sennit Clough (who is from that area) conveys the almost-trippy drift from the subconscious, ingrained with something painfully real. And all of it arrives with a level of formal poetic crafting which lifts this narrative into the extraordinary. For me, it is a verse novel, which in its telling, depths, and its sharply-employed devices, drives the relatively few words and white space of poetry to create a far bigger, more ambitious picture. Even the symbols which separate stanzas are chosen for their precise meaning. This is poetry on the page at its most intense. Equally, performed, my name is abilene must detonate.’ —Beth MCDonough, Dundee University Review of the Arts

‘My Name is Abilene was clearly a tough write, and it’s a tough read. We’re perhaps not to know how much of the darkness over Abilene was originally Sennitt Clough’s. We have to applaud the strength of mind that worked with it to produce a thing so well crafted and coherent.’ —Aidan Barker, East Anglia Bylines