Be Feared

Jane Burn

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781913437275
• eBook ISBN: 9781913437282
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Jane Burn's new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood, and love, encountering everything from the Snow Queen to monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms.

Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn's poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy-tale and folklore and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Trepanation
• How Austistic Spectrum Condition Made Her Worth Her Weight in Birds
• The Only Kind of Poetry I Seem to be Able to Write
• Coronach for my slender waist
• Mrs/Mother Hail
• Triolet for Easter and the icon I have made of a wizened rabbit’s pelt
• Look at me, lingering outside this murdered church
• Self-Portrait as an Inferno
• Thumbelina’s Birth as Told in the Style of Gregorian chant
• So you made a thousand shit decisions
• Fairy Stories
• Fat Alice
• This is a Frankenstein Night
• Schneewittchen and the Universe
• Aubade to the Noise of Chainsaws
• Red
• Aubade to a Wedding Photograph
• Gerda’s searching leads her to roses and, at the edge of the Snow Queen’s land, she realises that her Autism will always be the fairytale with no satisfactory end
• The Cursing Psalm
• Hood
• There are things that give me away if you know how to look,
• Frances Cornford’s poem about a lady in gloves makes me realise that I have feelings for a woman for the first time
• The nights in which I fantasise an evensong of us
• Are Vaginas a Deal-Breaker Thing?
• We could live in a cwtch of castles. I’ll grow my hair
• The First Time I Really, Properly Swim
• I was not the eye of the Hubble. I saw no cosmic string.
• Villanelle to Cold Psalms
• Quiero saber si tú aun me quieres and imagining seeing a bird burning in the sky
• Study of Life as Recorded in Cruel Lines
• Grin Both Ways
• The love that Orca taught me while he grew
• Ode to the Sight of my Coloured Cob
• The gifts she got at birth
• Poor blackbird crumb
• Be subtle as the Snow Queen,
• The truth began with a mirror, cruel and clean
• Magic Mirror
• My Offering to the Earth
• November’s Spoil of Rain and Plague
• Ways in which I came to be a thief
• The Altar of the Dead
• Spun from the Same
• The Un-flight of Porcelain Birds
• How the river takes whatever you pray
• If we are here when yellow has done with the year
• Is Autism/Covid happening to someone/somewhere else?
• The Advent Calendar of Most Useful Things
• If Ω Is For The Last Thing I Might Ever Do
• Acknowledgements
• About the author and this book