We’re ridiculously pleased to announce that our poetry reviewer Ellora Sutton’s pamphlet Antonyms for Burial (fourteen publishing) has been selected as the Spring Pamphlet Choice by the esteemed and perspicacious Poetry Book Society.
Here’s a taste of what the PBS judges said about the collection:
‘this is exhilarating writing’
‘a thrilling flair for imagery’
‘I read it three times through without being able to stop to catch my breath’
And here’s one of the poems in the collection:
Collective noun for birds
I think I am really an aviary masquerading as a girl.
My heart is a wood pigeon.
Sometimes I have a swim bladder and that
is a chaffinch. The gulls are restless,
they go wherever greediness is – my knees,
the back of my neck. Somewhere over my lungs
a heron.
I start seeing an ornithologist.
She feeds me sunflower seeds and pistachios,
warm breadcrumbs from her butter knife,
shows me the shapes required for flying.
I ask her what will become of the loose net of my body
when half or more of the birds want to migrate.
She says she doesn’t know, but she’d love to observe.
She says a beautiful sky, I’d imagine.
ELLORA SUTTON is the Creative Engagement Officer at Jane Austen’s House, and the poetry reviewer for Mslexia. She has a degree in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University for the Creative Arts, and an MA in Creative Writing with the Open University. Her work has been published online and in print by Poetry Review, Popshot, Poetry News, fourteen poems, The North, The Interpreter’s House, amongst others. She has also won the Mslexia Poetry Competition, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award and the Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition.
.jpg)
