Jenni Fagan, The Dead Queen of Bohemia, Blackheath Books, 2010“The Dead Queen of Bohemia is Jenni Fagan’s extraordinary follow up to her debut collection Urchin Belle, released last year on Blackheath Books. This new collection of poems, explores the peripheries of life with an unpretentious, lyrical brutality.
The Dead Queen of Bohemia takes in homage’s to 17th Century Chinese poetry, pornography in a Scottish caravan park, murder, first time sex in a hotel room, armed robbery, Elvis, native Indians, underage prostitution, coal mines and factories. Fights in wastelands, squirrels in the walls, bazookas, corpses, wife beaters, gang bangs and a white fox. There are dildos, moons, Eskimos, finest Bolivian, witches and stilettos, the ripped out heart of a Victorian debutante, quietude, despair and voodoo.
Fingerprints and butterflies; the covers of Fagan’s books mirror the contrasting defiance and fragility of her poems. Poems that document a disconnected fractured existence and what happens when there are no second chances.”
Five Poems
Jenni Fagan, Urchin Belle, Blackheath Books, 2009.“Urchin Belle is a debut collection that combines a genuine poetic originality with a startling no bullshit clarity. This is a voice born out of a life lived on the extreme peripheries of society.
The poems are as touching as they are heroic and as fragile as they are tough. The erotic and mundane collide with the surreal and extreme to produce a voice at once beguiling, shocking and entirely unapologetic.
The poems take you from downtown Cairo to Glencoe, to a world where sawn off shotguns, underage prostitution, dealers, pimps, bent cops and brutality are the norm. The stories of those living within and outside the system recur alongside the kind of raw erotic base need that leaves the reader wanting more.”
“Blackheath Books’ reputation as discerning independent publishers climbs another notch with a bruising first collection of poems by Jenni Fagan.
The back cover is proudly stamped with words from the Chairman of Edinburgh & Midlothian Young Offenders Report 1993: “Miss Fagan is a considerable danger, both to herself and to all of society.” In a Bart Simpson way, I’m thinking “cool”; except it’s not cool. Fagan’s accounts of abuse, violence and prostitution in childhood are far too real and unsettling to get off on some vicarious kick.
You can feel the danger throughout Urchin Belle as the fizzing tension and pressure builds like a can of Tennent’s booted down the stairs, ready to explode. It’s not all doom and gloom though; there are moments of snatched tenderness and the end poem about nicking lights from police cars provides a defiant, funny, and triumphant two-fingered finale.”
The Panopticon (chapter one of a novel ) by Jenni Fagan
Jenni’s blog
