Tuesday October 31st 6:30-9:00PM
Please join us for the launch of Shapeshifting for Beginners, the debut poetry collection by Emma Simon, which is being published by Salt. Emma Simon will be joined at the launch reading by award winning poets Caroline Bird, Glyn Maxwell and Tamar Yoseloff for an enjoyable evening of poetry.
Emma Simon has won a number of awards for her poetry. Her work explores how strange and surreal the everyday can be and how real life and stories tend to bleed into one another. These poems – mysterious, mythic, magical – remain deeply accessible, while being both witty and serious.
Praise for Shapeshifting for Beginners:
"Shapeshifting for Beginners offers us poetry of wonderful ideas and brilliant execution. I love the way these poems show us a familiar new world from new angles, following the flight of party balloons which escape into the sky, or celebrating reading through the unique scent of old books. The poems glory in the musical potential of language, and best of all wield such emotional punch, offering tender family portraits alongside meditations on the nature of life and death. It takes a special writer to create poems of immediate charm, which are good enough to renew the everyday world around us, showing us all its crazy beauty, strangeness and capacity for tragedy. The most enjoyable and exciting new collection I’ve read for ages." - Jonathan Edwards, poet and author of the Costa-award winning 'My Family and Other Superheroes' and 'Gen'
Caroline Bird won the 2020 Forward Poetry Prize for the best collection for her book The Air Year. Her latest collection, Rookie, is published by Carcanet and is a selection of poems from her previous six titles with them.
Glyn Maxwell latest full collection How The Hell Are You (Picador) was shortlisted fo the TS Eliot prize, while his most recent publication The Big Calls (Live Canon) uses the forms of classic English poetry to cast light on our currnet political situation.
Tamar Yoseloff has published six collections and has a new collection next year with Nine Arches Press. She published The Black Place (Seren) in 2019. She is the co-founder of Hercules Editions, whose books combines poetry and prose with printed artworks. Along wth Caroline Bird she was a one of the recipients of this year's Cholmondeley Awards, which recognise poets’ sustained excellence across a body of work.