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The Illustrated Woman
  • Published: 1 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9781784743222
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

The Illustrated Woman

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
1 Nov 2022
EBook
7 July 2022
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The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen Mort

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*

'A raw, tender, potent collection' - JESSICA ANDREWS

'Gorgeous poems - profound, exploratory, wild, playful - and completely now' - RUTH PADEL
________

The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen Mort

Let me kneel
before the sky and let me be humble, untidy,
let me be decorated.

Here are women's bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.

The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body - from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort's remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.

'These are poems that will leave their indelible mark' - ANDREW MCMILLAN
  • Published: 1 November 2022
  • ISBN: 9781784743222
  • Imprint: Chatto & Windus
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

Helen Mort

Helen Mort has published three collections of poetry: Division Street (2013), winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Prizes. She has written a novel, Black Car Burning (2019) and a short story collection, Exire (2019). Her creative non-fiction includes A Line Above The Sky (2022), winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, and Ethel (2024). She is a Professor in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield.

portrait photo of Helen Mort

Also by Helen Mort

A Line Above the Sky
Black Car Burning
No Map Could Show Them
Division Street
See all

Praise for The Illustrated Woman

Helen Mort's expert control of the line offers us footpaths through the landscape of the body, showing us all the ways we might mark, redeem, protect or fear for both our own and the bodies of others.

Andrew McMillan, author of PHYSICAL

A triumphal collection, that closes with a ritual cleansing and celebration of the naked body, as it should be celebrated... They can be challenging, unsettling poems for a man to read, but that's what makes them such essential reading - these are poems designed to get under your skin, where they belong

John Glenday, author of THE GOLDEN MEAN

The Illustrated Woman bristles with colour and truth. Helen Mort renders the body in desire, shame, love and pain across landscapes to create a dazzling portrait of our own skin as something that belongs only to us

Jessica Andrews, author of SALTWATER

Marvellous and tender poems... beautifully achieved... Mort's poems shine with bright risk throughout

Kate Kellaway, Observer, *Poetry Book of the Month*

Wide-ranging and insightful... These poems are by turns delicate and diamond-hard, with a real flair for a knockout closing line

Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Autumn 2022 Bulletin

Wildly impressive in its ability to balance its subjects with a questing intelligence without losing a human core

Rishi Dastidar

The Illustrated Woman celebrates the female body... Her deft poetry mesmerises as it troubles

Daljit Nagra, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022

A wonderful, endlessly re-readable work

Financial Times, *Books of the Year*

Mort's language is visceral, holding space for the complexities of experiencing pain

Guardian, *Books of the Year*

The title sequence is a complex, cohesive and at times dazzling analysis of another kind of writing - that inscribed directly on the poet's skin

Times Literary Supplement