Overview

Featuring ten collage illustrations by the author,Helen Ivory's new poetry collectionConstructing a Witchfixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. In this collection, the witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems ofConstructing a WitchHelen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries. Constructing a Witch is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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9781780377193

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Ivory not only calls attention to the historical practices that have been used to subjugate women, she also reminds us of the process of double-vision: here is an entire collection written in an ironic double-vision, a female writing the female through the male historical gaze. The result is nothing less than what Shuttle describes as “a strong explosion in the sky. -- Elisabeth Sennitt Clough * The North on The Anatomical Venus * The Anatomical Venus is an often disturbing journey of how women have been treated by men through the ages. It is historical reportage. It is controlled and focused anger without sentiment. It is subjugation and oppression laid bare in subtle and often mesmerising ways. It is Angela Carter’s eye meets Elaine Showalter’s brain. It is dark, upsetting and erotic. And it’s laced with magic from the first page until the last. It’s the suffering of women, and women fighting back in delicious and unusual ways. It says as much, if not more, about men throughout history as it does about women. Read this book. Then read it again. And again. With each reading, The Anatomical Venus will reveal something new, like all great books do. -- Mark Connors * Northern Soul * Historical it may well be but this collection’s contemporary relevance is searing… This collection is a stunningly curated linguistic exhibition on the historical abuse of women. Enticing and yet flinching, this disquieting house of dolls makes abuse seen and urges us to reevaluate why women are where they are now, and it does so with an eerie and unforgettable beauty. -- Rachel Smart * Rachel Smart, Storgy Magazine, on The Anatomical Venus *

Author Information

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and teaches for UEA/National Centre for Writing online. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe Books: The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010), Waiting for Bluebeard (2013) and The Anatomical Venus (2019), with a sixth, Constructing a Witch, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, out in 2024. Fool's World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. The cover of The Anatomical Venus, which features her own artwork, won the East Anglian Writers Book by the Cover Award (East Anglian Book Awards 2019).In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets.

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