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We are delighted that local author Maria Ferguson will be in the shop to chat to readers and celebrate the launch of her latest poetry collection ‘Swell’.In the consultation room I stared
at the purple flowers in their purple
vase and imagined my insides:
an ocean, a cave, a storm.
Maria Ferguson’s second poetry collection is a raw and powerful documentation of one woman’s experience of becoming a mother. Against a backdrop of the sounds and sensations of daily life, she longs for her own mother’s embrace, observes as her body changes and charts a course through loss and wilting house plants towards recovery, empowerment and renewal.
Tender, direct and winningly witty, Swell distils the poet’s complex feelings surrounding family and domesticity, exploring the contending weight and levity felt as she contemplates a thrillingly unfamiliar new chapter. Ferguson is a poet as alert to the absurd as to the shattering, and these are large-hearted poems, full of life and thought. Together, they invite the reader to join them in a search for self-acceptance, for freedom from shame and for a path to stability in increasingly uncertain times.
Maria Ferguson is a writer and performer. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologized, and her debut collection, Alright, Girl? (Burning Eye, 2020), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. On the stage, her one-woman show Fat Girls Don’t Dance (Oberon, 2017) won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show; Essex Girl (Oberon, 2019) was shortlisted for the Tony Craze Award and won Show of the Week at the VAULT Festival. She has been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Art, Stylist magazine and BBC Radio. She currently lives in Leeds.
‘A beautiful, powerful, profound collection of poems There is an honesty that is both heart-breaking and more hopeful than anything else I’ve read on this subject. She makes me weep and wonder in equal measure’ Hollie McNish
‘Tender, lyrical, a family mise-en-scene, exploring the tiny narratives that write us. These poems are an umbilical, a feeding. Beautiful’ Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto
‘Maria Ferguson articulates the previously unsayable in these radical, tender poems. Swell gives voice to the full complexity of motherhood – the love next to the guilt, the ambivalence next to joy, even the desire to sometimes run away’ Kim Moore, author of All The Men I Never Married
‘These poems have an energy which is infectious. Reading them will make you feel free and fearless – Ferguson shows us how language can give new meaning to our tenderest moments’ Helen Mort
Doors open 6:30pm event starts 6:45pm
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Truman Books, 86 Town Street, Pudsey, LS28 5, United Kingdom,Leeds
Tickets
