Girlhood

Description

WINNER OF THE DEREK WALCOTT PRIZE FOR POETRY Julia Copus's new collection, Girlhood, is a book of transgressed boundaries and seductive veneers. Restlessly inquisitive, it exposes the shifting power balance between things on the verge of becoming and the forces that threaten to destroy them. Reading these poems, we have the sense of encountering a series of filmic installations arranged by episode in a gallery. Lost, censored or disparaged voices speak out from secluded spaces and moments of hidden history: from within a professor's office and a deserted department store; from kitchens, bedrooms, hallways and upstairs windows; through changing weathers, fidgety shadows and the witching hour. Girlhood concludes with a sequence set in a psychiatric hospital that reimagines Jacques Lacan's treatment of his most famous case study, Marguerite Pantaine. This dramatic meeting of minds has us questioning who is the more delusional - doctor or patient: like other victims in this exhilarating new collection, Marguerite may initially appear vanquished, but a closer look reveals how little of herself she has really surrendered.

Julia Copus was born in London in 1969, read Latin at Durham, and now lives in Somerset. Her most recent poetry collection, The World's Two Smallest Humans, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. She has won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She works as a freelance podcast producer and in 2018 was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.