The Resurrection of Melissa Lee-Houghton: The UK’s Greatest (almost) Forgotten Poet Exposure/Ideal Palace
After a seven year gap due to personal difficulties and career highs and lows, Melissa Lee-Houghton returns from the edge of obscurity and personal precarity with a two-book collection Exposure/Ideal Palace published by Pariah Press on May 1st. You can pre-order the book at a discount price here.
Having won the Somerset Maughan Award, status as a Next Generation Poet and a critical and commercial success with her collection Sunshine, Melissa Lee-Houghton's rise from the suffering of trauma, mental ill-health and hospitalisation was a phenomena unto itself. However, literary betrayals, personal tragedy and lack of infrastructure to support this kind of a talent led to several years of silence from this unique, contentious and demanding author. The wait has not been in vain. Melissa's new double collection is her greatest work to date, her most fearless, exacting and intoxicating writing from one of contemporary poetry's near-lost, but essential and beloved voices. Nadira Clare Wallace investigates...
Melissa Lee-Houghton Interview
with
Nadira Wallace
NW — First off, congratulations on your new collection, Exposure/Ideal Palace forthcoming with Pariah Press. Before I dive into my questions about it, I want to back up a bit by remembering your poem, ‘i am very precious’, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016 and published in your book, Sunshine (Penned in the Margins), also shortlisted for a Costa Book Award. ‘i am very precious’ continues to stun me, especially the conclusion:
Blood pours into all of my poems like it floods
the views around my clitoris when someone says they like my
name. So please do say it again.
For me these lines encapsulate one of the most powerful and bracing aspects of your work, and that is its will to honesty and intimacy (often overtly sexual). Here the reader is reeled in by the last sentence, which is an invitation/command to participate, get the blood flowing or flooding in the speaker’s body. The result is an extraordinary and almost confronting sense of closeness (bringing Whitman to mind). A similar form of proximity opens Exposure/Ideal Palace with everything vibrating with lust and, again, the speaker requesting a sort of togetherness everlasting: ‘Please never resist me …’. Have you always written like this or is it something which has developed over time? And how would you describe the function of highly confessional––‘I am going to bare all for you’––poetry?
M L-H — Two questions that I have pretty enormous answers to! It’s going to be difficult to keep this concise. It’s the first thing anyone asks me about in all honesty – or the first two things – why do I ‘always write about sex’? and why do I write Confessional poetry? I don’t write about sex often, in fact, if my work as a whole is considered, and I think readers (and writers) these days don’t see much difference between writing in the Confessional mode and being ‘highly confessional’ – in the second instance, how would anyone know if I was confessing anything at all? Many assumptions are made about my work so let me see if I can tease something illuminating out of this because it does need addressing.
I was working both in the imaginal realm and the realm of voicing disallowed thoughts, feelings and happenings.
For me, exceptional experience, or highly unusual experiences are something I’ve had a great deal of from an early age. I think exceptional experience is usually used to denote psychedelic or religious experiences (well, I’ve had a LOT of those too) but I’m also talking about human experiences out of the realm of the everyday. Intense experiences. Without giving you my life story, suffice it to say that out of this enigmatic life I found a way of processing and assimilating these experiences descriptively through writing very early on. I didn’t have an exceptional education, was extremely poor when I was small, had a very interrupted education in shitty comprehensive schools I barely attended, but I was always precocious and as soon as I learned to write, I did a lot of it. If you have a lot of secrets and no one to talk to and live an incredibly lonely life, it can be a way to exist.
That aspect of it made my writing a very secretive thing – I had to hide it, in fact. I used to try and get hold of those diaries with the lock and key, or store my writing in strange places; I had a school desk at primary school full of personal writing and I lived in fear of it being discovered beneath my school books. I even found old dry stone walls near my house to stuff rolls of paper in. What I was writing were the very things I was not allowed to say. I think I created a world that was entirely mine, and entirely me, in which I had conversations (constantly, endlessly) with both myself, whatever that means, aspects of myself, and other characters – lost, loved, imagined. I was creating spaces. I was working both in the imaginal realm and the realm of voicing disallowed thoughts, feelings and happenings. All my work now is a continuation of this, though it’s taken me years to understand or recognise that – it’s been the longest, deepest relationship of my life and contains many voices and addressees. My poetry features the lyric ‘I’ because I am the subject – but the ‘you’ is transitory and changes between innumerable addressees, often between several different characters in one poem – and the reader only senses the one addressee – themselves, or an imagined other, often, a lover – creating a sense of intimacy, immediacy and continuity that exists only in a poetic sense – then the reader shapes it, bends it to their will. They meet me halfway and do some of the work within that imaginal space, following my trail. A great many times writers have told me I just write down stuff that has happened to me and don’t edit it. I laugh heartily! Oh how I laugh. You don’t write a body of work this vast and accomplished by doing that – technique comes in, a highly sensitive intelligence is essential. Is it all exactly as it seems or is something else happening? Those who don’t wonder and say they read poetry frankly astound me.
If someone spends their entire life documenting everything in writing, living out their epiphanies, regrets, experiences and desires obsessively as a way of living, at some point they are going to write about sex. If I didn’t I’d either be lying to myself or a very repressed individual.
‘i am very precious’ is probably my most known, read or ‘popular’ poem out there. It isn’t ‘about’ sex. I don’t believe its popularity is because it’s sexually explicit but that it pleads and appeals – to ‘you’, the reader – with something we all experience and suffer – desire.
If someone spends their entire life documenting everything in writing, living out their epiphanies, regrets, experiences and desires obsessively as a way of living, at some point they are going to write about sex. If I didn’t I’d either be lying to myself or a very repressed individual.
I don’t believe its popularity is because it’s sexually explicit but that it pleads and appeals – to ‘you’, the reader – with something we all experience and suffer – desire.
You asked if I’d always written that way. What I might describe as ‘ecstatically’? I gained some recognition with Sunshine, which was my third collection in fact, and had been writing for decades before that book and that particular poem entered the world. When I was a teenager I was a very prolific correspondent, something that never changed – this was before email – I just loved posting letters and they would always be lengthy, and I’d have such a thrill for that experience of sharing, of receiving a response, being heard. The privacy of it. The secrecy. The safety. The tactile nature of having a document, something I could hold and keep. A part of someone but of another space, another world. The music I grew to love, the experiences I grew to have, the art and the literature, all had an epic, rousing, ecstatic quality. I loved things that made me feel. I loved stepping out of painful reality into fantasies of Big Feelings and enlightening events. There are some early recorded poems on the Poetry Archive that show this kind of style developing from many years ago. I wrote a 200+ page ecstatic poem when I was nineteen. But my work is very varied, and the only argument I can offer as proof is to read my previous work. My first collection, for example, was a collection of poetic portraits of strangers I got to know as part of the concept. The writing grew alongside the development of my ‘knowing’ each person. Every poem is an experiment. The hope is that both myself and the reader discover something from it.
NW — I really relate to cultivating the practice of leaving reality for ‘fantasies of Big Feelings’ and being attracted to artwork or ways of being which promise ecstasy. Are there writers who particularly model this for you? And I’ve another question. You say your subject is yourself. Reading Exposure/Ideal Palace I was intrigued by these lines in ‘Come Back to Me’, which appears relatively early on in the collection:
The asphyxiation was a whole winter in which I could breathe again.
And you won’t read my solipsism anyway but if you did
you’d not need to slap me that hard to bring me round, I’d say when to bail. But I don’t want to come back. I’m untidying rooms […]
I was intrigued by the definition of poetry––I think it's poetry that’s being written about here–– as ‘my solipsism’. In case anyone is unfamiliar with the mainstream definition, solipsism is the theory that all that can be known is the self (and I happen to subscribe to this theory though I also think everyone is fundamentally connected so knowing one’s self means knowing all). In a moving poem entitled, ‘My Late Father’s Decline as Sunset Fell Over the Sea’, the term is used again:
I blink at the black type on the white screen;
the cursor blinks back – my discussion with you develops
silently and is worked through as I edit out the flaws in my voice.
My voice a distant, solipsistic agent,
and I am positive the dead are bending my words.
Why this solipsistic voice? Why found everything––or most things––on the ‘I’? And––sorry, this might be too many questions at once––how do you go about editing ‘out the flaws’ in your work?
M L-H — I asked a reader of these poems what the overall impression is for the reader, which I know is an impossibly precise question – but I meant what kind of feeling it inspires. The person very honestly and helpfully, for me, replied, ‘it feels very hostile.’ I smiled. Not many people see the self-deprecating parentheses where I’m questioning myself, the act of writing, its worth or ‘value’ in itself, or in the world for others to access. Also, I think my writing can be terse, and if someone wants to find any kind of truth in who they are and what that ‘self’ is they’re immersed in, they need to confront their shadow – Jungian, but it features in some shape or form in every religion, philosophy and culture we know of. That other side, the Unconscious, the darker side we are all driven by collectively and singularly which, if we try to keep hidden, will still function silently. I think it’s best to try and see it, however horrible that turns out to be. In looking at the things I do, about myself (and it really isn’t all about me, there’s a massive relational aspect – there is always an other or a co-conspirator or confidante there, or as Matthew Caley once said of my work, my ‘ever-present darling’…) it’s impossible to ignore the doubt and the eclipsing feelings of smallness, the perversity in being in this world knowing this is the best I can do – write about the human condition, often very badly, for the very few people who might read and the even fewer who might gain something from reading it. Who am I to voice my thoughts when so many cannot and are never heard?
I always believe it’s vital that the things we find most uncomfortable, the things we make knee-jerk reactions to or have powerful feelings towards or against, often judging without thinking – these are often the things we project because we don’t want to associate them with ourselves.
There’s a sarcasm – ‘the lowest form of wit!’ – but it’s tracing the edges of all this unknown territory, all that’s at stake in trying to see into it and force the ghosts out. I wrote to someone only this week and told them, ‘I both feel like a ghost and as though I am haunted.’ Perhaps that is my Ego and my Unconscious fighting for superiority in there always, as is the case with all of us. It’s right there, and perhaps it gives a sense of unconscious familiarity, or at least a jarring discomfort in the reader when they recognise it. I always believe it’s vital that the things we find most uncomfortable, the things we make knee-jerk reactions to or have powerful feelings towards or against, often judging without thinking – these are often the things we project because we don’t want to associate them with ourselves. This is the real work of being human and growing. If we can learn to notice this, and writing is a valid and powerful way into the unconscious – we confront something that has power over us, we can’t always control, and surely that should sound a little shaky, a little hostile. I certainly find the act of writing very difficult and often distressing, even when it is liberating – you learn things you have avoided and then in this case, I also share those things and that involves a great degree of vulnerability. Surely the reader deserves to know it’s come from me, that I am owning these statements as my own and I am not ashamed to exhibit my less pleasant and attractive side?
One day I went to school and told some of the other children that I was in fact, a ghost. Having spent all my early years dissociating from things happening to me, reaching into a very otherworldly place in my imagination to survive, this made some kind of sense.
The solipsism is often a little jibe to myself I unconsciously reveal in my work – it’s part of my trauma. I wasn’t heard, listened to; I didn’t exist as a child and often feel I don’t exist unless I am writing. I’m making it visual, making it permanent. When I was at a Church of England primary school as probably the only student there whose family described themselves as ‘atheists’ who attended Spiritualist churches and consulted mediums, I was a very unusual child who alarmed the teachers – I can see looking back how bizarre things I did and said were, and how often they unsuccessfully attempted to intervene. I could be disruptive, angry, but mainly withdrawn. One day I went to school and told some of the other children that I was in fact, a ghost. Having spent all my early years dissociating from things happening to me, reaching into a very otherworldly place in my imagination to survive, this made some kind of sense. Learning about religion and attending church affected me, but I did not understand any of it. I sang in the choir, but would feel so unutterably terrified every Sunday and bewildered by it all that I would shake and afterwards, cry intensely. When I began having panic attacks each Sunday morning, I stopped going. I hid in the park instead. I spent a great deal of time hiding, all my life. I’ve fought hard to learn to do the exact opposite, and it has cost me. This terseness is because although I don’t take myself that seriously in everyday life, I take writing very seriously. I take having a voice seriously. I know what it’s like to feel like you could scream until the end of the world and it would make absolutely no difference and no one would notice at all. Sometimes, this is me screaming.
That distant, solipsistic agent has worked very damn hard to be something else. Since my last collection came out I have felt defeated in many ways. This isn’t a lot of posturing and artifice for me, my work is a desperate, howling concatenation of the inner and outer, violence, longing, a wish to be heard. But I also understand that writers must very respectfully understand where they fit into all that has already been written, and probably said better than I can ever manage – there are other landscapes to recognise – there’s a spiritual one, for me, that is ever-present if not explicit in my work, and there is the literary landscape, and the cultural landscape – a writer has to know their history and pay attention to what is happening in the world beyond. I try to weave in very many concerns and threads that are not in any way personal to me, but important. I don’t believe in solipsism at all, I don’t think. A poet I admired once criticised me for being ‘solipsistic’ and I think perhaps I took it to heart a bit too much. I feel I’m always one step away from constructing a defence of anything I say or do – I’ve spent my life being asked to explain myself, defend myself, never quite managing to, knowing there’s no reason anyone should constantly have to.
As a daughter, wife, mother, artist, prostitute, writer, woman, I was always the object. Writing helped me into that position from which I had the opportunity and the ability to feel I was not that ‘ghost’, but very real, and not powerless.
With regards to my poem ‘My Late Father’s Decline as the Sunset Fell Over the Sea’, I suppose death can invoke a certain solipsism. Addressing my dead father knowing he won’t talk to me was another venture into seeking a hidden voice; and all I receive is my own in response. I think perhaps I find a sense of defeat I can’t accept in the idea of having a solipsistic voice, a solitary self, untethered. I don’t believe that is the case now I’m a little older. If you take the material world that is known to us down to its most essential quanta and you could view all of it from above, the world would appear as a seamless sea of dots and waves and possibilities – but nothing would look especially separate or different from anything else. We live in a vast dimension of realities we can’t even see or sense, but I see all of the material world as more of an interwoven tapestry than space with separate objects in it that cannot interact beyond their own consciousness. I don’t believe that is the case at all. We are far more than we know. I had to go through that and many other griefs to come to this conclusion.
The statement I made in the previous question, the ‘I am the subject’ (you have to forgive my convoluted responses; I had a serious head injury and have spent the past three years coming to terms with a different brain – still ‘me’, but linearity is not something that my brain attends to anymore) – it isn’t true – the real statement is, ‘I am the subject, not the object,’ – the subject is vast and varied, but the ‘I’ is ever present because I have to own this, I have to own my own voice in a world that has denied me that privilege in myriad ways. I’ve been objectified too often. Sometimes in life it takes a huge amount of energy in the unravelling of oneself to be able to heal and grow, and if you can manage it, like I believe I once did, you can shift your position to a far more tenable, stable one. As a daughter, wife, mother, artist, prostitute, writer, woman, I was always the object. Writing helped me into that position from which I had the opportunity and the ability to feel I was not that ‘ghost’, but very real, and not powerless. I had my own identity and what I had to say was valid. I hope this goes some way to answering those questions, though in all honesty I think several books of responses probably wouldn’t give a definitive answer! We evolve, my writing evolves. I wrote Exposure/Ideal Palace over the past seven or eight years so some of the work, like the poems you quoted, is very old to me now, and I believe I’m at least capable of wisdom and growth as time passes. Ask me again in a few years. Perhaps I will remove the ‘I’ completely in a future incarnation, but for now it is an important part of my process.
NW— You said: ‘I am not ashamed to exhibit my less pleasant and attractive side’. This makes me think of some stunning moments in the collection involving the acceptance of defeat or a sense of wrongness. A couple examples. In ‘Reassuringly Bourgeois’, you write about ‘this disabling / ineptitude to be with myself’. Elsewhere we find: ‘There is a bone lodged in the throat of my life’ (‘I’m Amazed’). And ‘Overshot’ winds up by asking:
What did you lose? Your shoes, your favourite top, your money, your drugs, your children, your children, your family, your children, your sanity, your home, your family your health, your work, your agent, your sense of ever having limits, your courage, your pride your love, yourself.
You lost yourself. Go outside,
she may be still hanging out in the bar, trying not to die badly and badly
I have still managed to sink it all and look! It’s all floating out there in a fever of defiance because even as I lay dying I still wrote to you.
Every time I read these lines they deeply move me. Can you expand on the so-called ‘unpopular’ emotions in your work––grief, abjection, rage? And your thoughts about representing suffering in general? You mentioned this can create a certain terseness of tone. Is there anything else it gives rise to or perhaps demands aesthetically?
M L-H — There’s innumerable things I could address here when reflecting on suffering and its place in my work. I’ll try and expand on how it corroborates with some aesthetic elements of my poetry and why I think suffering as a subject is both valid and essential.
I don’t think feelings can be unpopular, we can’t choose which ones we have and experience them all – but sharing them can. I was brought up being told never to show my feelings or talk about anything painful; berated and punished when I did. My world was a tightly controlled world of secrets and silent suffering. This is because of the generations before me – a grandparent who fought in WWII and came back unable to talk about any of it for the duration of his life; something he passed onto his children and my mother who refused to accept there was anything at all to be gained by searching for or speaking one’s mind. I was certainly condemned for being the very opposite of what she expected in that regard. Many parents expect their children to be extensions of themselves; but this is not how people grow. Sometimes ways of being are so inherent within our families they are instilled in our genes. I think I somehow missed out on the genes my family expected me to have.
I came to the idea very early in my life that the worst forms of suffering in this world must be those which are unwitnessed.
Something in me thought very differently, though I was unable to speak up for myself until I’d gained my own identity and broken the familial grip on me – a lifelong trauma plus a lifelong self-defence mechanism. Perhaps the suffering I endured from all this silence and disavowal made me have an excessive need to fight this stance and continue trying to voice the pain and the injustices. Partly, I came to the idea very early in my life that the worst forms of suffering in this world must be those which are unwitnessed. No matter how one tries to describe unbearable suffering to another person, it is entirely inadequate and no other person can ever truly know what another has endured. We have all these words, and yet some things are worse than our worst imaginings. Think about how often murder, rape, torture, genocide, abuse, suicide &c. occur all over the world daily, minute by minute, second by second – it is unbearable to me. Everyone who has endured unwitnessed suffering should be listened to. It changes your life, and you as a person. It can also endow one with a certain kind of wisdom no one can learn in any other way or wish for.
Have I in some way attempted to provide myself with a witness? Or have I attempted to provide myself with addressees, some of whom are dead – is this a part of grief or love or an overall attempt at some reclamation of lost objects and dissolved time? It’s all of these things, perhaps, on one level. To continue communing with those I have lost is perhaps the ultimate form of grieving and the ultimate form of cherishing love. Isn’t that what we do when we think of Christ and pray? We attune to something symbolic, beyond our mortality or ideas of self – something far beyond death – with longing.
We must try to know ourselves, and all art helps with this. I believe we all need to try to return to the inner and heal ourselves to raise human consciousness above this lightless limbo we’re currently whirling around in if we’re to affect any change at all in the destruction of the world we inhabit.
I suppose then we need to consider what this ‘I’ is again. Apart from the aesthetic elements of using the lyric ‘I’ there are some things I’ve been thinking about lately – let’s start with criticism for my use of ‘I’ in my work and some interesting misunderstandings that have arisen.
Photograph by Ben Jackson
After my third collection was published, a renowned and respected poetry reviewer wrote that it appears from my poetry that I have many ‘bad relationships’ and therefore must be an ‘unreliable narrator’. I found this exceptionally puzzling but it led to me to make some revelations about how poetry can evoke startling responses in others. The concept of an unreliable narrator simply doesn’t apply to poetry. I could see clearly that this reviewer had read much poetry, and celebrated many poets who had adopted the lyric ‘I’ through literary history (there are VERY many!). He certainly hadn’t questioned their authenticity. But what is an authentic voice when it comes to poetry? Is that not like asking what an authentic portrait is to the entire history of art and demanding it is adhered to? I have no obligation to journalistic reportage – that is not the pursuit of poetry, and whether I use personal experiences and private emotions through my work is irrelevant – how would the reader ever know? I always felt disheartened that Anne Carson was clear to mention that her writing was addressed to a fictional ‘husband’ in her exceptional collection ‘The Beauty of the Husband’. Why was it important to make the distinction? If this idea of authenticity is at stake, then are we really reading a poem, or a piece of reportage? I do not write reportage.
When I consider the point of history in which I’m writing – the breakdown of our health and our bodies is in tangent with the breakdown of our sanity, our culture, our economy – society has disintegrated (Note: not is disintegrating). Some of the things killing people in droves post-COVID-19 which killed many and is also a case in point: cancer and suicide. We’ve been polluting and poisoning everything in sight including ourselves and continue to do so though there is a disconnect between human culpability and some ill-defined hope that humans can reverse it all somehow – the suicide rate has gone steadily up over the past decade and is now something we should all be ashamed of – children are now taking their lives all over the world and it’s not unusual at all. The suicide rate in this country is despicable. We’ve been pumping fossil fuels into the air, our bodies are exposed to so much carbon radioactivity, pollution, chemical poison, even the food we eat is so over-processed it’s carcinogenic – radiation incessantly hammering our bodies – and all we’ve done is add more pollution, more poison, burn more fossil fuels, dump more nuclear waste, poison everything in sight, and then put all our money into attempting to find cures for diseases we’ve created more of through all this damage.
I think that being willing to show the world your faults, sins, weaknesses – is spiritually and holistically vital to the prospect of both human and biological/ ecological reparation.
The politicising of phrases like ‘climate change’ so that people can endlessly debate about it on social media and look at anything other than facts – and then there’s the infinite 3-minute hate: social media. A world where people can infinitely project, argue and hate one another forever without even a moment of contemplation or shame. The world is largely deterritorialized, and I see nothing but decay. I wasn’t born into wealth, I’m below the poverty line now, and perhaps that makes it easier to view things dispassionately. I have nothing to covet. But entropy always ebbs towards a maximum, and we’ve set in motion the end of the world even before we were born; this is just the downhill slide we’re on. Does this make me angry, enraged, terse? Yes. I bet no one thinks of me as an eco-poet (why does that phrase even exist?) but all of this informs my work – I live in this, we all do. I’m helping things decay, I’m no exception. The responsibilities we give ourselves are so miniscule.
Sometimes I feel like writing like I do, with the personal; exploring sensation and suffering, evoking a kind of contemporary Romanticism via Modernism and revelling in all this musicality and language; it feels like a microscopic and inevitably pointless but necessary rebellion – in the world we’re living in. We must try to know ourselves, and all art helps with this. I believe we all need to try to return to the inner and heal ourselves to raise human consciousness above this lightless limbo we’re currently whirling around in if we’re to affect any change at all in the destruction of the world we inhabit; as far as I can see, we’re already way past the event horizon with things as they are on the ground. I have come to think it’s wrong to bring children into this world where all children born are necessarily caused harm by being born. As a mother who loves her children, I have also had to accept that they didn’t ask to be born and I have to take responsibility for the fact I brought them into a world so full of harm, harm they can’t always avoid. We hold responsibility for far more than we ever seem to grasp. If we want to spend time putting filters on photos and keeping all things surface from rippling, we will not grow. I think that being willing to show the world your faults, sins, weaknesses – is spiritually and holistically vital to the prospect of both human and biological/ecological reparation.
In ‘Ideal Palace’ I moved on from ‘Exposure’ which perhaps inhabits a mor real and visceral reality, and I built myself a poetic space. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Jungian discourse, outsider art (Ferdinand Cheval’s ‘Le Palais Idéal’) – overlap one of the imaginative resources I endlessly depend on a return to the symbolic – my dreamscapes, which often resemble the landscapes of my real life interwoven with the psychic landscapes of my ego and identity, consist of infinite rooms in an infinite ‘palace’. I have been recording my dreams in notebooks since I was a child, and have ‘mapped’ them to some degree, though not in three-dimensional terms. I wanted to take myself out of the myre of the lucid but deranged desperation in ‘Exposure’ and into my imaginal space of hyperobjects and desire.
Perhaps the ‘I’ is similar to the ‘I’ in Exposure, but situated in a different place and time. The focus shifts from the intensity of the moment to the nostalgic sensory. The image evokes sensation; the dead and lost have something to say. Mortality concerns me less and less – my body, in pain. It’s momentary – we have no idea of the stage we’re on, its vastness; we have no idea how vast.
As poets, we look to the inner and the external world – but can we ever be truly objective at all? When I am regarding something and writing it down, am I not regarding myself regarding something else? Wherever I am situated, I still see through these eyes and through this identity; objectivity in poetry is pure fallacy. To construct a space then try to remove myself from it and still describe something – well who then is writing? The absence of the writer in a poem is just a lie. There is such a disconnect there; one I find I can’t betray in my own work.
EXPOSURE/IDEAL PALACE IS FORTHCOMING WITH PARIAH PRESS. ORDER HERE.
Melissa Lee-Houghton’s third poetry collection, Sunshine, was a Guardian book of the year and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, the Ted Hughes Award and won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2016. Her poem, i am very precious, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best poem. She is a previous winner of a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction. Her novel, That Lonesome Valley was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Award in 2019. She is a Next Generation Poet and has written for Radio Four and The Guardian. Exposure/Ideal Palace is her forthcoming fourth poetry collection (Pariah Press).
Nadira Clare Wallace has written literary essays and reviews for Textual Practice, SPAM Magazine and Rain Taxi. Their creative work has been published in Shearsman magazine and as part of Earthbound Press’s Poetry Series. Nadira’s first collection is forthcoming from Guillemot Press.
