Overview

Small Change by Steph Ellen Feeney is a radiant, unflinching collection that distils the seismic transformations of new motherhood into a sequence of poems both intimate and expansive. With lyrical clarity and fierce emotional intelligence, Feeney traces the blur of postnatal days, sleeplessness, bodily estrangement, rural isolation, small joys and submerged rage, crafting a poetics of contradiction, beauty and survival. The work is formally nimble, often fragmentary, and suffused with humour, candour and mythic resonance. What emerges is a document of maternal time in all its fractured, luminous detail: devotional, ambivalent, and defiantly alive.

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9781917617802

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Reviews

This collection is set in the lush, unruly terrain of early motherhood. Moving between tenderness and irreverence, exhaustion and ecstasy, these poems confront the terror and responsibility of loving a tiny creature with total force. They shimmer with colour - lilac, iris, lavender, raisin - and pulse with appetite: I WANT. From baby discos to church shit, from cotton candy to confetti, the domestic becomes electric, strange, and sensuous. This is motherhood - intimate, defiant, and ordering another negroni. - Rachel Long Careful and wild simultaneously, like an electrical circuit where each line-break and image is precisely connected to allow the maximum current. - Caroline Bird What are the challenges in bringing new life into our current world, what are the challenges to a woman's body, to her identity? In this exceptional debut collection, Steph Ellen Feeney writes about the experience of motherhood, throwing off the typical clichés and delivering poems which are truthful, visceral and modern. There is great lyrical skill on display as well, especially in a series of loose sonnets tinged with the warmth of an Italian sun. And there is much joy, love and humour - a glowing collection from a poet to watch out for in future. - Tamar Yoseloff These are wonderful poems: brief and deep and symphonic. Steph Ellen Feeney's work is charged with the body electric. To slightly distort, and yet echo, the poet herself: May you never unlearn this li(f)e. - Colum McCann

Author Information

Steph Ellen Feeney was born in Louisiana, raised in Texas, and now lives & writes in Suffolk. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Gutter, and Propel Magazine, amongst others. This is her first book.

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