ISBN: 9781913437275

Price: £9.99

Publication date: 11^th November 2021

Format: Paperback

Extent: 80pp

DCF: Poetry Collections

Jane Burn’s new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood, and love, encountering everything from Snow White and the morning song of chainsaws to myths, monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, moving from ‘beware!’ and ‘bereft’ towards a becoming – 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, invoke a divine carnival of sexuality and wild nature, 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.

About the author:

Jane Burn is a poet and illustrator based in the North East of England. She has won many awards over the last few years including the Sliver Wyvern at the Poetry on the Lake Festival and first places in the Wirral, PENfro, Bailieborough and Wolverhampton Literary Festival Poetry Competitions.

She is a working class bisexual with a late diagnosis of Autism. Her poems have made regular appearances in The Rialto and have been published in many quality magazines like Under The Radar, Iota Poetry, Crannog, Vanguard Editions 14, Butcher's Dog and the Oxford English Journal. Her poems have appeared in anthologies (Writing Motherhood, #MeToo, Planet in Peril), Humanagerie, The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, and the Anthology of Illness as a few examples) from respected presses like Seren, Fairacre Press, Eibonvale Press, Fly on the Wall Press, Smokestack and The Emma Press. Her work has been nominated for the Forward and Pushcart Prize. In 2019, she co-edited Witches, Warriors, Workers, a volume of contemporary women's poetry and essays with Fran Lock for Culture Matters Press. Her illustrations have been used as covers for many books published by BLERoom Press and she has provided the artwork for the covers of anthologies like Noble Dissent (Beautiful Dragons), Bloody Amazing (DragonYaffle) and Be Not Afraid: An Anthology in Appreciation of Seamus Heaney (Lapwing). She lives with her family for eight months of the year in an off-grid wooden cottage as she cares deeply for nature and the environment. Poetry is her true love and the only place where she feels confident, fluent and able to express the unique way she sees the world.