ISBN: 9781913437602 

Price: £10.99

Publication date: 8^th December 2022

Format: Paperback

Cover artwork by Katrine Kalleklev

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.

About the poet:

Angela Readman is a poet and story writer. Her poems have won awards including the Mslexia Competition, The Charles Causley Prize and The Essex Poetry Prize. Her short stories have won The Costa Short Story Award, The Mslexia Competition and the New Flash Fiction Review competition. Her story collection Don’t Try This at Home (& And Other Stories) won The Rubery Book Award and a Saboteur Award. In 2019 And Other Stories published her first novel Something Like Breathing. In 2020 she won the Working Class Nature Writing Prize. In 2021 she was awarded a Society of Author’s and Author’s Foundation grant for her story collection The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles (Valley Press, 2022.) Bunny Girls is her second collection with Nine Arches, following her late diagnosis with autistic spectrum condition. She lives in Northumberland.