Poetry Book Society Choice
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize & the Whitbread Poetry Award

Beguiling erotic poems from the haunted house of adolescence: madness, menace and betrayal.

Selima Hill's Bunny is set in the haunted house of adolescence. Always blackly comic, sometimes beguilingly erotic, each echoing poem opens a door on madness or menace, shame or blame. Bunny tells the intimate story of a young girl growing up in London in the 1950s, confused and betrayed but finding herself, becoming independent.
Appearances are always deceptive. That predatory lodger. The animals outside and within. The girl sectioned in the hospital, nursing her sense of wrong. The blueness of things. The fire.
What the house contains, it cannot hide. The poems reveal not only what was papered over but what she learned. About how to be a woman. How to be loved. And what happens to innocence.

'We are straight into Selima Hill's highly individual territory. Who else can use snakes and blancmange to tell a slanted story of strangeness and estrangement, illness and eventually, freedom. The story is the teenage girl's. It moves with her through strange rooms and psychological states like an art-house movie. Here are unstated threat, sexual anxieties, lobsters and Vaseline - "She wanted fun, what she got was tartan". Selima Hill is such a sensual poet. No one makes more of smells and her lines are unmistakable - "with a head like a fish with something wrong with its head". Every page reveals her unique ability to invert the world and shake it, until it reveals its truth' - Kathleen Jamie & Maurice Riordan, PBS Bulletin.
'She is truly gifted. She invests mundane things with visionary, delirious brilliance' - Graham Swift, Sunday Times
'Selima Hill evokes, for me, the inner childhood world we're supposed to give up as we become adult yet which artists need to draw upon' - Michèle Roberts, Time Out
'Wayward, funny, terrifying. Her writing scintillates with hatred, love and absurd insights' - Gillian Beer, Financial Times