Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781727751
Publication date: April 14, 2025
Price: £10.99
“Innovative, stirring poems … A poet adept at weaving devastating candour with humour and wordplay…” – Rebecca Goss
The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning is Alison Binney’s eagerly awaited debut collection. The title refers to the act of de-cluttering one’s own life to save loved ones the trouble, a reality far removed from the poet’s own experience of sorting and clearing the family home of a parent with Alzheimer’s. Connection, memory, loss and belonging are recurring themes in poems which explore all the messy sides of life. Writing with heart and tenderness about coming out, coming of age, teaching, nature, grief and recovery, Alison Binney’s poems sing with vitality and humour.
Alison Binney
Alison Binney is a poet and English teacher from Cambridge. She has taught in state secondary schools for 28 years, and also teaches on the PGCE English course at the University of Cambridge. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Other Women’s Kitchens, won the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and was published by Seren Books in 2021. Her poems have been widely published, online and in print, in journals such as The North, The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Strix, Spelt, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Gutter, Under the Radar and The Fenland Poetry Journal. Her poems have been Highly Commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, the Bridport Prize and the Rialto Nature and Place Competition. She founded the Cambridge branch of the National Writing Project, which brings together teachers as writers. A keen hillwalker, she has very slowly acquired a taste for the Fens.
“Binney crafts poems that are intimate, funny, and deeply moving… Rather than tidy things away, these poems linger in life’s lovely messiness – its complexity and connection, whether that’s of memory, identity, family, etc. And maybe that’s the point – because some things aren’t meant to be boxed up and forgotten; some things deserve to be held a little longer. And that’s how I felt about this wonderful book, too.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“…stunningly impressive and inventive debut collection, combining pitch-perfect verbal and technical skill with wit, cleverness and, most importantly, heart.”
Barbara Bleiman, Education Consultant and Writer
“Alison Binney demonstrates the power of language to elevate and celebrate, as well as to eviscerate and diminish, through prejudice and shaming… richly evocative, authentic, celebratory messiness, which is not to be avoided, or feared. Binney is a fearless observer of human connection and complexity.”
Catherine Smith
“A must-read debut. These assured and funny poems can’t look away from life’s messiness… a vital lyric collection where Binney holds your hand as she breaks your heart.”
Jo Clement
