Launch reading by Emilie Jelinek, Clare Pollard and Jessica Traynor
Do join Bloodaxe for this launch reading by Emilie Jelinek, Clare Pollard and Jessica Traynor. All three poets will be celebrating the publication of our three new September titles by reading live and discussing their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Emilie Jelinek's pamphlet The Sky Around My Father was the winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/He4JaXNJzdw
If you register by midday of the day before the event, you will receive reminder emails. Register on TicketTailor here: https://buytickets.at/bloodaxebooks/1795910
For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards via the same YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/He4JaXNJzdw.
Watch live or later via YouTube.
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links. (Books will be available to order from early September.)
Emilie Jelinek: The Sky Around My Father
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-sky-around-my-father-1389
Clare Pollard: Lives of the Female Poets
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/lives-of-the-female-poets-1378
Jessica Traynor: New Arcana
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/new-arcana-1379
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Emilie Jelinek: The Sky Around My Father
Winner of the Mslexia Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2024
Emilie Jelinek charts the estrangement between a daughter and her brilliant, charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music – where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, she captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond – its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.
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Clare Pollard: Lives of the Female Poets
Clare Pollard cocks a snook at Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets. These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poet’s own everyday life – from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane – all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages.
Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the ‘Poetess’ over time, there are also poems about writers’ lives – sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L.
Whether imagining a ‘three-martini afternoon’ at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the book’s long, closing poem, Clare Pollard’s playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.
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Jessica Traynor: New Arcana
Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, this highly inventive collection builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend (personified in the poems as ‘lydia deetz’) who died by suicide. Interwoven with numbered poems from a newly imagined Major Arcana, New Arcana celebrates both the holding on, and the letting go.
New Arcana is Jessica Traynor’s fourth collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Dedalus and Pit Lullabies (2022) from Bloodaxe.
[29 July 2025]
