Bloodaxe Books
Jen Campbellis a bestselling author and award-winning poet who lives in London. Her most recent books include a short story collection, The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night, a series of children's picture books about a book-loving dragon called Franklin, and The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers (Thames & Hudson, 2021), a collection of gruesome tales illustrated by Adam de Souza. She talks about books, fairy tales and disfigurement on her extremely popular YouTube channel. Her first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2019. It was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category). She won the Spelt Poetry Competition 2022 for her poem 'The Hospital is Not My House' from her second collection, Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit (Bloodaxe Books, 2023).
These are poems which land the reader in the middle of a
fantastical ocean and float them to shore on the precision and
inventiveness of their imagery; these are poems that create their
own mythspaces on the unstable edges of disability and chronic
illness, poems which conjure new ways of articulating things about
the experience of living in a body which might usually feel beyond
language.
*Andrew McMillan*
Jen Campbell's astounding second collection draws us into a world
of mythology, sea monsters and metamorphosis. These are hauntingly
beautiful poems that catalogue transformation in all of its horror
and joy, strangeness and tenderness. Reading these poems is like
being yanked off your feet by hidden currents. This book will
burrow under your skin and stay there.
*Cynthia Miller*
The poems are bold and assured. A delicate balance of wonder,
playfulness and horrific revelation.
*Michel Faber*
This blistering poetry collection explores showmanship, the
so-called freak industry, fairytales and spectacle – and, in fact,
it doesn’t so much unpick these things as smash them to pieces and
make them new… I love so much about it: how it kicks against tropes
of disfigurement, how science jostles against fantastical circus,
how it explores the way in which girls’ bodies can be sites of both
self-discovery and exploitation. It is defiant, bold, brilliant. As
the penultimate poem states, 'Smash this circus to the ground'.
*The Guardian*
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