Description
Where else could you expect to encounter a gene therapy doctor keeping clouds of butterfly facts and such strange bedfellows as the God Apollo and Rabbie Burns’ mice, T-Rex and a Banana Circus, Emily Dickinson and NASA, two goldfinches as a charm and a shark in a Sheffield swimming pool?
Winner of the Disabled Poets Prize 2024, Susie Wilson’s debut pamphlet collection Nowhere Near As Safe As A Snake In Bed charts the painful absurdities of living with advanced melanoma and the cutting-edge science used to treat it. Judged ‘extraordinary’ by Pascale Pettit, this incisively perceptive and darkly humorous series of poems and notes inventively plays with imagery, form and language, while refusing ever to look away from the seriousness of its central theme: the ridiculousness of how life changes on you.
‘Nowhere Near as Safe as a Snake in Bed brims with exuberance and invention. Despite the serious theme of a life-threatening condition, the poet’s palpable love of metaphor and language, by some magic spell, leaves us feeling hopeful. Susie Wilson is a dazzling new arrival.’ – Pascale Petit
Nowhere Near As Safe As A Snake In Bed is tonally agile and narratively fluid – witty and playful, with a constant engagement with the tangles of living with advanced cancer. Susie deftly constructs a series of multi-layered and vividly described vignettes, hilarious and absurd, beautiful and peaceful, cut through with a perfectly calibrated honesty, and a self-conscious awareness of their emotional weight. This is both one of the funniest pamphlets I have ever read and one of the most authentic descriptions of living daily life in the face of one’s own mortality – Jamie Hale
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Half poet, half tutor, half clown and Winner of the Disabled Poets Prize 2024, Susie Wilson has worn many hats. A former prop-maker, theatre manager, lawyer and English teacher, she now tutors, draws and plays jazz piano (though not at the same time). She is a Scottish auDHD writer currently living in Sheffield with two beardy dogs, her wife, a diagnosis of advanced melanoma (hats are now essential) and the intention of training in clowning while continuing to write as long as she can.
Susie has poems out now in Propel, Ink Sweat & Tears, Northern Gravy, Black Bough and Envoi, forthcoming in Carmen et Error. Her poetry has previously been widely published in anthologies and has been commended and listed including by Poets & Players and The Rialto Nature competitions. Her work also includes collaboration with composers at the Royal Northern College of Music and a commission from the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus. A micro-chapbook, Skin The Rabbit, about growing up in Scotland, on the outside looking in, will be out with The Braag in Spring 2025.
Her work explores time, vulnerability and the absurdity of life and nature.
