Description
About the Author
Suzanne Batty has published two pamphlets with smith|doorstop books, Shrink (1997) and Thirty at Thirty (2016), and two book-length collections with Bloodaxe, The Barking Thing (2007) and States of Happiness (2018). She won the Poetry Society's Anne Born Prize in its inaugural year, 2015. She studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University and subsequently became a lecturer there. She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, photographers and printmakers, and uses creative writing to support people experiencing and recovering from extreme mental distress. She lives in Manchester.
Reviews
Suzanne Batty's States of Happiness is an extraordinary collection that explores mental anguish. It begins with a complex sequence of poems in memory of her twin sister, who died of a rare degenerative disease. Though the book is dark and disturbing, it is also filled with chinks of light. The poems are as compelling as any thriller and full of insight and empathy. -- Jackie Kay * The Guardian (Books of the Year 2018) *
Reading these tour-de-force poems is to encounter shadow-wonders and brilliant terrors, often drawn from the molten core of childhood, its fury and rue. Here is extraordinary witness in poems that recall the work of Janet Frame in their confronting both of mental anguish and the transformations that are the hard won and healing reward for the descent into such perilous depths. States of Happiness is distinguished by its implacable grace. It invites us '"to lie down in Samuel Beckett's boat, your arms full of lilies". -- Penelope Shuttle
Book Information
ISBN 9781780374260
Author Suzanne Batty
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd