Wednesday 25 May • 6.30-8.30pm • Council Room, Strand building, Strand campus, King’s College London
Of Bodies and Cities: New Queer Poetry by Sophie Mayer and John McCullough
Please join Queer@King’s and Poetry at King’s for a reading, discussion and glass of wine to launch two new poetry collections from Salt Publishing. The Private Parts of Girls and The Frost Fairs together ink queer histories and bodies elegantly, passionately and firmly onto the map of British poetry.
Sophie Mayer teaches Creative Writing at King’s, and is a Commissioning Editor for Chroma, Europe’s premier LGBTQ arts journal. The Private Parts of Girls is her second collection, following Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009). Her poems, which blur genders, eras, languages and intertexts, burn with secret ways to be a girl: talking back, taking flight, inking skin, becoming the Beast, and facing down a god.
John McCullough teaches at the University of Sussex and for the Open University. The Frost Fairs is his first collection, exploring love in many forms, from modern transatlantic relationships to hidden gay and cross-gendered lives from the past through a striking array of voices, as abandoned lovers watch frost fairs melting on the Thames and drag queens revel in the freedoms afforded by the Blitz.
Free and all welcome.