Publication release date: 22nd July, 2024
Book Specification:
36 pages printed on recycled paper
Paperback handsewn limited edition
13cm x 20.5cm x 0.3cm
Print run of 100
ISBN: 978-1-0686635-1-2
Book design by Karolina Federowicz
Book cover artwork by Nora Hreb
Book production by Lucy Wilkinson
Lips Blue, Drying Up, Marina Scott
- Lips Blue, Drying Up explores what it is to live in an uncomfortably gendered body in the context of a socio-political landscape that feels increasingly violent and hostile across all axes. These poems were written over the course of five years and in the midst of abusive relationships, political despair, and ecological grief. They hold onto hope through hurt and imagine a possible world that is better.
Like the eel burrowed hot, this collection finds its way in, nestles under nail-beds whilst reading; under skin taught over gulping lungs; around the cochlea of ears - listening for heartbeat, seas’ pulse, sighs between sleeping and crying. This eel - these words - sears, arresting. Navigating the stickiness of lusting to cold plunge of grief, these poems shift and score, gradual fissures in earth and heart. Vignettes of reconciliation and recklessness, sky-scrawls of a quiet hope. The pain of telling someone you want to fold inside them as though an origami portal. I am taken inside/away/towards something raw and ruinous here; perhaps, towards what it is to feel loving. - - Lu Rose Cunningham