Poetry
‘Reading Wendy Allen’s poetry makes me realise there is a precision to the erotic, every line feels like a held breath’ – Caroline Bird
Wendy Allen’s Portrait in Mustard celebrates sex and pleasure, whilst registering the risks of intimacy for straight women in a world where men’s pleasure often comes first. Via the unabashed tones of mustard yellow and metaphors of fruit and art, Allen’s poems create a manifesto for women’s independence, autonomy and joy. These are explicit, honest poems which embrace sex as an integral part of relationships and love. Sex is posed here as an experience that needs to be reclaimed by women trained to be polite and put the needs of others before their own.
In recurring poems about fruit, Allen recalls sexual pleasure while considering loss, the body, trust, and betrayal. Portrait in Mustard delights in the intimacy of the memory recalled. There is no hiding or questioning the validity of sex on the page, where Allen is not so much confessing as delighting in a sculpturally proud sequence of poems.
While Allen’s speaker is sexually confident and full of unbridled laughter, Portrait in Mustard also emphasises the risk of intimate relationships for women. There’s the lover who doesn’t turn up in ‘Service Station’ or the partner in ‘Pleasure Yourself While I Watch’ who cares only about his own gratification and not his lover’s. These are the stakes, so while Allen’s poems are shamelessly erotic, they are also a reclaiming of power and autonomy for women.
Wendy Allen
Wendy Allen is a PhD Candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University researching Barbara Hepworth’s sculptural practice as a new poetic practice. Her debut pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird, was published in 2023 by Broken Sleep. She has collaborated with Charley Barnes on freebleeding (Broken Sleep 2024) and Galia Admoni, i get lost everywhere, you know this now (Salo, 2024). Her work has appeared in bath magg, The Moth, Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, The Rialto, Propel and Poetry Wales. Wendy writes about art, sex, menstruation, and Barbara Hepworth.
“This confident work is confessional and intimate, but it is also a bold and explicit manifesto for women’s desire, as bright and hot as mustard.”
Poetry Book Society
‘Wendy Allen’s intelligent and ekphrastic hymns to the body sing out with life and engender a reseeing of the world with a bold eroticism’.
Richard Scott
‘Wendy Allen centres sex and desire, often through striking metaphors of ‘an unspecified sea’, and always with careful attention to form and syntax – a keen awareness of punctuation, breath, and space.’
Alycia Pirmohamed
‘Allen’s is a fresh and bold new voice, determined to delight’
Sarah Corbett
