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Eleanor Rees
Eleanor Rees is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent is The Well at Winter Solstice (Salt, 2019) and her fifth collection Tam Lin of the Winter Park, in which these poems will appear, is forthcoming from Guillemot Press in May, 2022. Eleanor is senior lecturer in creative writing at Liverpool Hope University and lives in Liverpool.

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Three Poems

Poetry

April 2022

Eleanor Rees

Poetry

April 2022

ESCAPE AT RED ROCKS   I am the colour of the outside, a stillness moving like a winter tide, a new shoreline in formation,...

poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

Irenosen Okojie’s first novel Butterfly Fish (2015) follows Joy, a photographer in London who inherits a cursed brass head and her grandfather’s diary, after the sudden death of her mother Joy begins to discover a far more complex and tragic family history than she could ever have imagined – and keeps catching glimpses of a young Black woman who looks strangely familiar in the background of her photographs Okojie’s writing twists and shifts the world as we know it, opening up realms of exhilarating and sometimes terrifying uncertainty Her work is dizzyingly rich with symbolism, metaphor and startling narrative turns, undergirded by a deep understanding of human frailty and empathy for her characters   Okojie’s darkly funny, tender and surprising short story collection, Speak Gigantular (2016) features two ghosts trapped on the London Underground, a young woman with epilepsy determined to solve the disappearance of her neighbour and an altruistic bank robber dressed as a big yellow bird Characters faced with challenging situations like unemployment, grief or incarceration find themselves plunged into bizarre but revelatory experiences, including being rescued by statues or enlisting a helpful crocodile to eat disappointing men In her second collection Nudibranch (2019), we meet characters ranging from a woman farmer raising a small boy who is part of a lethal secret experiment, a famous musician caught in an obsessive love affair with a possible murderer and a Black acrobat in nineteenth-century Prussia ‘Grace Jones’, a story from Nudibranch that won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, introduces a young Grace Jones impersonator working at a raucous party; over the course of the evening, the reader slowly comes to understand how the death of her entire family in a terrible fire continues to emotionally sever her from other people   Okojie’s family come from the city of Uromi in Edo State, Benin, a part of Nigeria which once formed the flourishing royal capital of the Edo Kingdom, a rich historical lineage that has inspired Okojie’s writing Born in Nigeria, she moved to England aged eight and attended school in Norfolk and London Okojie is a polymath: in addition to writing prose,

Contributor

August 2014

Eleanor Rees

Contributor

August 2014

Eleanor Rees is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent is The Well at Winter Solstice...

Crossing Over

poetry

September 2012

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

As he sails the coracle of willow and skins his bird eyes mirror the moon behind cloud. Spring tide drags west but he paddles...

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feature

November 2014

The Last Redoubt

Scott Esposito

feature

November 2014

As they say of politics, I have found essay-writing to be the art of the possible. Certain work can...

Interview

December 2013

Interview with Tess Jaray

Lily Le Brun

Interview

December 2013

In the light-filled rooms of The Piper Gallery is a painting show that features no paint. Brought together by...

Interview

March 2013

Interview with Billy Childish

José da Silva

Interview

March 2013

Buzzed in through the red metal door and down the stone steps into the bunker that is L-13. The...

 

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