Bunny Girls

Angela Readman

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781913437619
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Out of the doll's house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal, spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir, northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural ideals of femininity.

Here in Readman's skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe's body double, squashed slugs, sexual awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds. Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and the worrying.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Christingle the Year Before My Mother Called the Priest
• Pica
• K.I.S.S.I.N.G
• Our Lady with the Sacred Heart
• Bunny Girls
• Peat
• Angel Mechanics
• Ode to Nosebleeds
• Incomplete Autobiography in Blood Nouns
• Nora
• The Female Alien’s Dictionary
• Truth & Lies from a Spectrum Childhood
• Girly
• I Told GI Joe Thanks for Nothing
• Miss Monroe’s Body Double on the Set of Something’s Got to Give
• Ode to a Severed Head
• When the Body Refuses to be a Temple
• Another Miss Universe
• Letter to a Twelve-Year-Old Self
• The Usherette’s Eczema
• Flass
• A Bluebottle Summer
• The Black Egg
• Man Dusting
• Ode to a Dust Sheet
• Hush
• Psalm for a Street Swept by Plague
• Commercial for the Uninvention of Bread
• The Survivalist’s Guide to Love
• Bringing Back the Day
• Alternative Endings for Hitchcock’s The Birds
• How to Make a Blackbird
• Curator of Rain
• 10:58am in November
• Haugh
• Arrival of the Siberian Swan
• The Blow Torch
• The Still of Churches
• After Fifteen Days I Leave the House
• H2O
• How to Get with the Invisible Woman
• Procedures for the Detective after Thelma & Louise
• Interrogating the Kiss
• In Praise of Disney Villains who Refuse to Retire
• Girls Who Shit in the Woods
• Assessment for Snow Globe Addiction
• The Snowwoman Ponders Existence
• Dysregulation as Snow Woman Word Search
• The Afterlife of Girls
• The Probability of Summer
• The Penultimate Girl
• Poetry Club
• Thanks & Acknowledgements
• About the author and this book