Other Women's Kitchens

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Friday Poem – ‘The way you knew’ by Alison Binney

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The way you knew’ by Alison Binney from her Mslexia award-winning pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a kitchen with the faint shadows of people moving through it. The text reads: Other Women's Kitchens. Alison Binney.

Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a poet who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading.

The way you knew the way you knew your own coat in the cloakroom the way you knew as you chewed how big the next bubble would be the way everyone knew the new boy was weird even before he began drinking ink the way you knew how to share crisps and when to and why it mattered the way your bike always knew the way home the way you knew when to laugh and how much and who with the way you knew not to sit at the front the way you knew when to put your hand up and why no one did any more the way you knew not to wear shoes like that the way you knew what behind the bike sheds meant before anyone said the way everyone knew who went the way you knew the name carved on the desk wasn’t yours but the izza lezza made you go red the way you knew not to wear your hair short the way you knew how to walk how to talk how to french kiss a boy and why you had to and more the way you knew for sure that if anyone knew about you you were dead

Other Women’s Kitchens is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

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Friday Poem – ‘On Wonder Woman’s Island’ by Alison Binney

This week our Friday Poem is ‘On Wonder Woman’s Island’ by Alison Binney from her debut pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens which is the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet competition 2020.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a kitchen with the fain shadows of people moving through it.

Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a gifted new voice who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading. Seren is thrilled to be presenting this author’s first collected work.

On Wonder Woman's Island the women are all leather and deltoids, sword fights and whirling hair. They call 'you are stronger than your know,' reaching out sinewy forearms to lift each other up off the sand. Any time you can yell 'Shield!' just for the hell of it and a girl will kneel, shield angled over thigh, while another runs up, springs, fires an arrow mid-leap, lands on a silver horse. At night there's a cave with an underground waterfall jacuzzi and a nook in the wall thick with fur. And if the men come, lugging guns up the beach, you sleep on, cat-like: seeing only sheer cliffs and bare rock they will soon turn tail, their flag not worth the planting here, and the breeze long gone.

Other Women’s Kitchens is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

The Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition is now open for entries for 2021. Find out more on the Mslexia website.