Description
My Deep and Gorgeous Thirst is a first collection of poetry by Ellen McAteer, founder of tell it slant poetry bookshop in Glasgow and Publishing Manager of the Poetry Translation Centre in London. The poems follow a journey from genderless tomboy to womanhood, through trauma, danger, motherhood, menopause, alcohol abuse, and the loss of her parents to cancer. The journey is mapped through the migration of her family, which retraces the forced political and economic migration of her working-class Scottish and Irish family. Unspoken emotions are projected on to the landscapes, cityscapes and edgelands that frame her search for home and self, and those same surroundings, filled with the ghosts of ancestors, shape her thoughts and feelings, as she fights to escape the heavy-drinking, ever-moving, success-fearing life and early death of her heritage, and break down the fences and walls of her past.
‘These are poems that contain all the blood and guts and love and pain of family. Poems that take you deep into places that you have never been but which you nevertheless know intimately. Poems that you want to sing along to. Poems that you want to drink along to. Poems that are at once comforting and troubling. Some of the poems here are so beautifully crafted that you feel sure they must be the work of decades, and others feel surely like they must have arrived all at once in a lightning bolt. There is so much to enjoy in this book by Ellen McAteer.’ Henry Bell
‘From the psychological and physical horrors of a hospital emergency ward “When the metal folding cot eats my brother, and he screams as it bites, I try to bewitch it open”; to the fanning out My Deep and Gorgeous Thirst — Ellen McAteer bewitches us, and yet does not shy away from hard subjects; ones she confronts with an intricate lace of words, with the skill of a surgeon’s scalpel. She writes, “In a desperate desire to escape the white room, I feel the wriggle inside me, a swallowed spider of awkwardness force-fed to me by the teacher to catch a fly which was swallowed because it wanted to disappear.” McAteer’s poetry is simultaneously visceral, playful and colourful, one that “reveal our stark truth”. Using free verse and prose poetry modes, she injects an energy into her lines that make them leap out of the page. “Molest me with your tongue instead”, she says, urging us to read her work, rewarding us with “the mirror’s cold unblinking gaze.” This book demands reading and rereading.’ Sudeep Sen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ellen McAteer is a poet and songwriter. Their poetry pamphlet Honesty Mirror, published by Red Squirrel Press, won First Prize in the New Writer pamphlet competition judged by Helen Mort. They have been a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and on the University of Oxford Creative Writing MSt, a mentee of Rachel Long under an Arts Council DYCP grant, and of the Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship Scheme, under Alexander Hutchison, and they have an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths. They are Publishing Manager at The Poetry Translation Centre and Founder and trustee of Tell It Slant poetry bookshop in Glasgow.
