Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781727720
Publication date: February 17, 2025
Price: £10.99
“Her work attains a revelatory power, carried aloft on her immense wit and originality” – Joe Dunthorne
“…the poet’s completely individual voice, bristles and jumps and zings with excitement and verve.” – Jonathan Edwards
Following the Laureate Choice Pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants, Emily Cotterill’s debut collection Significant Wow is delivered with dry wit, fizzing with humour and inventiveness. Her subjects range from celebrity culture (Blondie, David Bowie, Michael Sheen) to the class system (“Money in your mouth like an accident”) to reservations about parenthood in ‘A Speculative Script for Motherhood’.
Many poems focus on coming of age in the 1990s and 2000s, such as ‘Love Song to a Poster Boy’. Cultural icons and moments from the time, such as the repeal of Section 28, rub alongside more personal moments. A careful observer of other people, Cotterill writes in praise of a drag queen neighbour, the heptathlete Carolina Kluft, and Avril Lavigne explaining punk to an ‘uninterested’ journalist. This is a poetry of the street: of slag heaps, of Wetherspoons and McDonalds, of the Brains factory and the designer outlet, of shabby but buzzing towns.
Here is a surreal mixture of feral hogs, terrariums, the YouTube trend: GRWM (Get Ready With Me), and James Dean Bradfield shopping in Tesco. Inhabiting urban, post-industrial spaces, Cotterill is a millennial voice laced with neo-punk spikiness.
Emily Cotterill
Emily Cotterill is a Cardiff based poet originally from Alfreton in Derbyshire. Her debut pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants (smith|doorstop, 2019) was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a part of the Laureate’s Choice series. Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of locations in print and online including Poetry Wales, The North, and The Waxed Lemon. Emily writes about place, identity, and pop culture and her forth-coming full length collection from Seren features appearances from such familiar names as Debbie Harry, Michael Sheen, Halle Berry, and Sonia from Eastenders.
“The poems of Significant Wow accomplish something deeply signifcant: they make you excited about the living world again. Fluid, hungry and grounded in exact detail, they light up our towns and villages, from ‘the unthreatening men of blood donation… dishing out club orange biscuits’ to ‘the deep pile carpet at your home cinema’. From a tender ode to ‘the drag queen who lives in your building’ to the surreal remembrance of the shopping centre fish pedicure, to the last wolf killed in Britain, they forget nothing and eulogise the everyday. Themes of identity, ageing and gentrification are explored with energy and freshness against a backdrop of haunting losses and missed chances in small towns. Everything is interrogated: chance encounters with celebrities, social class, girlhood, the motorway hard shoulder.”
Bryony Littlefair
“Emily Cotterill’s poems are built from the things that poetry usually leaves out: the service station slip road, the trailer for Charlie’s Angels, James Dean Bradfield in the vegetable aisle. But in her work, all these things attain a revelatory power, carried aloft on her immense wit and originality.”
Joe Dunthorne
“Emily Cotterill’s Significant Wow gives us a rich range of imaginative and unforgettable scenarios. James Dean Bradfield pushes a trolley through Tesco, Michael Sheen halts work in an office by parking his car outside, LinkedIn is used as a platform to recruit surrealists, fish pedicures are offered outside Primark. While the ideas are wonderful, the most significant wow of all is the poet’s completely individual voice, which bristles and jumps and zings with excitement and verve. As poems should be, these are immediately accessible and engaging, a joy to read, showing us a recognisable world of shared housing and drunk men in Joy Division t-shirts. I love them for the way the language shimmies and dances, could go anywhere next, show you anything. Like the speaker in one poem, who finds herself still whispering a telling phrase years after a childhood game has ended, so these pages draw you back, again and again, to the glorious gift of this writing.”
Jonathan Edwards
