The launch of The Chalk Butterfly by Jane Monson and Life’s Stink and Honey by Lynn Valentine rounded off our Spring into Summer launch season with extraordinary readings and lively discussion. Haunting, compelling, moving and beautiful were just a few of the responses from the audience.
Each of Jane Monson’s quietly immersive prose-poems is a light cast on the different facet of a vulnerable, interdependent world. Inanimate things are as charged with sensation and volition as the human minds and bodies that respond, sometimes painfully, to their disorder. This writing leaves us with no choice but to see more clearly; it enables us to care a little more.
Philip Gross
Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on – bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world.
John Glenday
Catch up with the event here.