Louise Fazackerley is a poet from the exotic Northern streets of Orwell’s Wigan. In performance she explores the synergy between poetry and movement. Her socially conscious writing makes the ugly beautiful and the mundane fantastical.
Winner of the BBC Radio New voices award, Louise is signed to Nymphs & Thugs spoken word label where she released two audio books- Love Is A Battlefield and Bird St. Her collection The Lolitas is the subject of ‘Love Is A Rebellious Bird’ an installation and film work by international artists AL + AL. She recently supported punk poet legend Dr. John Cooper Clarke on his sold-out tour.
Louise is a director at Write Out Loud, a national organisation supporting grass roots poetry and currently poet-in-residence at Lily Lane Primary School.
She is a highly experienced workshop leader, facilitating in education, prison and community settings. You may have seen or heard her on BBC 1, BBC Radio 3,4,5 or read her blog in The Guardian Northerner.
‘A great performer’ Will Self
‘A voice that tingles with promise’ Ian McMillan
‘I wish I’d discovered her 5 years ago. I love her and you will too.’ John Cooper Clarke
The Lolitas is an extraordinary first collection.
It is a genre distorting, disconcerting, dystopia of daughters, single parenting, love and abuse. From the lyric tenderness of the first kiss, to a place where poetry borders with reportage and records the experience of working with groomed girls in the care system.
Darkly humorous, the work weaves working class narratives of fiction, fact and foretelling, in an intensely readable, page-turning glut of the gamine.
The collection is in part a response to Nabokov’s Lolita, a response to the #metoo movement, and includes poems that explore the story of Shamina Begum, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and how Japan treats teenage girls. It is – a powerful addition to the growing canon of #MeToo literature.
Also in BREAKING NEWS Verve Poetry Press are proud to be bringing out Louise’s pamphlet ‘The Uniform Factory’ this Autumn. It is based on her BBC Radio Three Verve New Voices show ‘Love is a Battlefield’ which is already out on audio with the ace Nymphs & Thugs. This exciting work will be published very early in September 2020 and will be available for pre-order here very soon. (Louise therefore becomes the first poet to release a second book with Verve Poetry Press!) Watch this space, and meanwhile enjoy the extracted poem featured below.
Excerpt from ‘Remembrance Someday’ in The Uniform Factory
The poppy, dropped on blue lino
at the side of the bath.
A prick of the pin, a rake of the knife,
that plastic green stem is whirring round
and round, tickticktick,, twitching, defibrillating,
the raw red paper of helicopter blades
begin to hum and roar- men scream in relief,
an hours wait, the morphine’s wearing off,
this man, this boy is still alive, handover to the doctors,
they can fly away without jumping
from the white of the bath like the white of the
ward like the white of the eyes of one, two,
one, two, one, two, one, two, three boys
who you saved, who were supposed to survive,
like the white of the poppy the pacifist wears
like the white of your anger, like the white
shrouds of Afghan dead, like the dirty, white
of my wedding vows, like the white teeth
of Azad, haggling for chickens,
like the white of the fallen feathers, like the
white of divorce papers in the shredder,
like the white of the skirting boards
you scrub and scrub, like the white of the
toothpaste on your daughter’s cheek
like the white bone of the domino
