Slip

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A daring and beautifully crafted debut collection about the experience of abortion – from an emerging poet and winner of the Northern Writers’ Award

‘Amelia Loulli stakes out fresh imaginative territory’
JACOB POLLEY, author of Jackself

‘Painful, brave and steadfastly honest’
ANDREW MCMILLAN, author of Physical

Amelia Loulli opens this fearless, frank, absorbing debut with the words ‘I’m going to tell you what happened’, and that is precisely what she does:

If our mothers could see us now corridors of girls lifting legs like candles
to the stirrups

One in three women in Britain will have an abortion by the time they are forty-five. For such a common procedure it still carries social stigma, and has not been the subject of a dedicated book of poetry – not, at least, until now. With these careful, generous, insistent poems, we are led through the experience: surprised at every turn. There is vulnerability and despair, there is the shame and silence too, but there is also the constant, steady pulse of compassion, tenderness and wonder at the world.

Slip is a daring book, not just in subject but in style: skilfully worked, integrating the rich terror of nursery rhymes and folk tales with the bland banalities and euphemisms of social interaction, of medical techniques. It is also, sadly, a necessary book – provocative and transformative poetry about women as mothers and survivors. A cry of fury and a cry of love.Slip returns again and again to what should not be a radical thing to say – that a woman must be able to choose what happens to her body. These poems make a complex, wild, contradictory, beautiful, grief-inducing and tender journey into the landscape of motherhood, and what it means to both accept and refuse it—Kim Moore, author of The Art of Falling

Painful, brave and steadfastly honest lyric poems which sing beautifully of the resilience and everyday miracles of the body—Andrew McMillan, author of Physical

Original, essential and utterly bewitching; from fairy tale to clinic, hallelujah-gospel-choir to nursery rhyme, Slip hurtles us through abuse, adolescence, child-raising and abortion. Driven by love, grief and fierce joy, these sublime poems insist throughout on a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and song. An unforgettable collection—Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron

Slip is essential reading: a beautiful, fiercely moving debut from a brilliant young poet. Amelia Loulli stakes out fresh imaginative territory in language that makes a new and thrilling music—Jacob Polley, author of JackselfAmelia Loulli is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University where she researches the poetics of breath and writing trauma. In 2021 she won a Northern Writers’ Award and in 2023 she was writer in residence at the British School in Rome. She currently lives in Cumbria with her three teenagers and their whippet.GB

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