Angela Readman Boeken

Exploring the lives of iconic figures like 50's pin-up Bettie Page and later hardcore porn stars, this collection of poems delves into taboo subjects with remarkable sensitivity. The verses traverse a spectrum from suburban life to the glitz of cinema, capturing both stunning beauty and profound poignancy. Each poem is cinematic and haunting, offering a visual experience that is at once beautiful and devastating, illuminating the complexities of desire and societal norms.

Bold, beautiful and spiky, Angela Readman’s stories are both magical and real. Following her acclaimed debut Don’t Try This at Home, in this new collection, she approaches the fairy tale with a scalpel. The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles reads like a love letter to girlhood and a ransom note to all the fairy tales we have been told. In her prize-winning work 'The Story Never Told', an illiterate woman sells fairy tales for a book she knows will never have her name on the cover. In 'What’s Inside a Girl', a class takes lessons on dating invisible girls.Dark, funny and surreal, these stories explore, challenge and ultimately transform the traditional fairy tale narrative. Women learn to be origami, climb into swan skins, feed wolves, flip burgers and snog kelpies. In dazzling prose that remains matter-of-fact, these tales take to task the happy endings we have been sold.Otherworldly, yet down to earth, The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles discovers the hidden voice in the stories we know and reveals the magic within working-class lives. These stories have teeth.

Friendship blossoms between an enigmatic girl and a whisky distiller's granddaughter on a remote Scottish island.

From fairy-tale gifts to gutter living, via your Mum becoming Elvis, Angela Readman's award-winning stories display Angela Carteresque magic

The slack-tide is the worst, curled on my side I cup a conch to one ear, as if, I may hear a cough of men washing up on the shore. Angela Readman's The Book of Tides is treasure trove of luscious, visceral poems that are delightfully risky, utterly thrilling and always close to the bone. Readman's poetry teems with the rare and beautiful, the dark seaweed sparkle of a particular strand of skewed folklore; here we encounter fishermen and mermaids, a man with a beard of bees, a Tattooist's daughter, Joan of Arc, and Beatrix Potter's bed - a rich swell of voices with an irresistible and peculiar power. Salt-speckled and sea tinged, these poems possess a distinctive eye for disconcerting and uncanny details - from notes in bottles and knotted handkerchiefs to sequin fish-scales and drowned rats. To read Readman's poetry is to be simultaneously unsettled and enraptured, and to encounter witchcraft, murder, love and loss. As The Book of Tides unfolds, will you dare to put your ear to its seashell and tune into its siren song, cast yourself adrift on a its strange and alluring current?

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.