Product Description

'Sugar and spice and all things nice'. Is that what little girls are made of? 'Magazines, lippy and a push-up bra?' Porn star, sex symbol, victim or whore? What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? Are we born girls? Or are we the products of what has gone before? "Strip" reveals the lives of 50's pin-up Bettie Page, hardcore porn stars and the little girl left behind on the way with stunning beauty and poignancy. The poet is not afraid to go beyond the boundaries of taste, and ask what lies beneath images we both admire and demonise. The strong voice of these sensitive and powerful narratives manages to find a sad beauty within lives. These cinematic poems are political in the most subtle sense as they explore the intimacy of power relations, gender, and unpick notions of glamour to find the tale behind the glossy centrefold. The work is a tapestry of how femininity is created, culturally and individually, exposing how the girl on stage stitches together her personae, and then strips her down layer by layer. Poems that refuse to shy away from the dark, the grotesque and the taboo, but lead us, through an interplay of beautifully crafted, sensuous language, striking visuals, voice and often devastating observation to bring us face to face with the 'other' in ourselves. The true shock in these haunting narratives is that these lives speak to all of us about family, sex, power and love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #926014 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 80 pages

Review
must be obvious that I loved this collection of poetry. It is one of the most exciting collections I have read in recent years. "Strip" goes straight to the core, very little metaphor, just very stark images that explore society and the experience of girls and woman within it. The language and imagery is cutting, beautiful and sad. I felt as though I was breathing with these narrators, experiencing the small detail of their lives. -- Annie Clarkson Stride Magazine

About the Author
Angela Readman has worked as a cleaner, a painter, a copywriter for radio, an editor, and lectured at The University of Northubria. She won the Biscuit poetry competition in 2004, and has been published by Diamond Twig, Iron Press, Biscuit. Her work has been translated into Finnish by Ek Zuban. She currently lives in Newcastle.

Customer Reviews

this collection has turned me on to poetry
I dont normally read poetry, but my wife showed me this.

This is the first poetry collection i have read fully and its fantastic, if more poetry were this exciting it would be more widley read. This makes poetry feel like the new rock n roll or even the new black.

Reading the first couple of poems at random i was blown away, and soon decided i had to read it in order.

I read the collection from start to finish (occasionly having to skip back to re-read poems a second or even third time) to fully appreciate the connections between the poems and the characters, unable to put it down, as i had to find out what was to happen next (i say this, as in places the poems sit together more as a novel in poetic verse than a collection random poems).

The author seems to have really gotten into the characters within this collection (the porn star, the pin-up and the farm girl (who grew up to be infamous in the 80's for having sex with animals), not that this collection is vulgar or gratuitous in anyway (with little to no mention of the actual in's and out's (excuse the pun) of the porn industry).

The farm girl poems focus on childhood, dealing with isolation & detachment from the human world and her connection with the pigs. The 'Porn-Star' sections focus is on 'How a Girl Could do That', showing how a young girls life and experiences might lead her into a life of porn. Finally, the 'Pin-up' section shows that there is a life behind the lense, and not necassarily a smooth one at that). The book deals more with the girls lives more than what they do for a living.

The character choices in this book are unusually brave, fresh and exiting, when compared to some other poetry i have read (with not a single poem being written about birds, fields or trees), and it pays off, making the collection exhillarating, contagious, griping and much more than just the sum of its parts.

If you like poetry, buy this book, you'll love it. Even if you dont normally like poetry, try it anyway, it might just supprise you, it did me.

a wise, witty, sad, sexy and surprising collection
I remember lads at school sniggering about "Animal Farm"; a porn film in which a woman slept with animals. Yuk, I thought. Little did I know that years later I would read some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever read about the star of that film, the Danish woman Bodil Joenson. Poetry that should have been in our English lessons. It would have shown us that poems can have a lot to say about people. That they can be amazingly readable at the same time as having an abundance of stunningly crafted images and metaphors. And, as girls wondering what the heck it means to be a woman, we'd have picked up some insights about how it is possible to take part in sex as a thinking, feeling, sensing subject rather just as the object of a male gaze.

Fairytales, illusions and dreams are woven throughout these nonetheless deeply real, concrete poems. The American Dream is another persistent thread in the collection, beautifully rendered, and the collection is prefaced with a poem about perhaps the ultimate American Dream myth, The Wizard of Oz; mostly the lost women and men in this collection are fighting the sleep of illusion and searching for home.


Multiple speakers and personae are conjured; from porn stars to porn agents, from teenage girls to Bettie Page. Readman is a skilful ventriloquist; the voices are distinct and clear. I especially loved the child voices.

This covetable, pink hardback would be a perfect Christmas present for someone who likes reading; even if they're not usually a poetry lover this wise, witty, sad, sexy, surprising collection could convert them.

by Kate Fox

Porn free
I remember lads at school sniggering about "Animal Farm"; a porn film in which a woman slept with animals. Yuk, I thought. Little did I know that years later I would read some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever read about the star of that film, the Dutch woman Bodil Joenson. Poetry that should have been in our English lessons. It would have shown us that poems can have a lot to say about people. That they can be amazingly readable at the same time as having an abundance of stunningly crafted images and metaphors. And, as girls wondering what the heck it means to be a woman, we'd have picked up some insights about how it is possible to take part in sex as a thinking, feeling, sensing subject rather just as the object of a male gaze. ("Let me breathe in and out to the fit of your hands/Let me let myself not always be camera ready/...Let me see that your eyes are not apertures). Although; controversially, we'd have learned how pin ups like Traci Lords, Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe also managed to get some of their freedom and identity and power by being reflected back in the eyes of the men who desired them. ("Seeing him see me let's me unsee all the ugly that I've seen", and "My reflection in his eyes spun my bleach straw into gold".)



Fairytales, illusions and dreams are woven throughout these nonetheless deeply real, concrete poems. The story of Bodil, the star of "Animal Farm", becomes a poignant modern fairy tale in a long sequence stuffed with stunning images; "She gets on all fours, nose rutting the floor/ as she grunts and snorts/makes a sound like the skin of a girl/being unzipped to let a wolf in".


The American Dream is another persistent thread in the collection, beautifully rendered; "We will churn out of who we have been/and onto Route 66 on a ticking bus/so silver it slices the sun", and the collection is prefaced with a poem about perhaps the ultimate American Dream myth, The Wizard of Oz; mostly the lost women and men in this collection are fighting the sleep of illusion and searching for home.




Multiple speakers and personae are conjured; from porn stars to porn agents, from teenage girls to Marilyn Monroe. Angela is a skilful ventriloquist; the voices are distinct and clear. I especially loved the child voices. Gorgeous lines like "I was a cartwheel waiting to happen" and comforting childish dreams of growing up; "Again we play the wedding game/the one day where we'll be happy ever after/when we have followed the crumbs of each other/to find our real selves in a little wooden house". I defy anyone with a heart not to read the long poem "One Thing" about a girl's loss of her virginity and her golden dreams of first love being shattered without at least a catch in their throat by the end.




The narratives are clear, but a hazy, shimmering quality hangs over the whole collection. Partly because of the American landscapes which are conjured. Partly because of the dislocation that is evoked by the projection of places onto people and vice versa. Also in the way that, the mainly women, speaking these poems, do their best to make sense of dysfunctional families in which people and faces are confusing whereas "bodies are relatively simple".




Something is being searched for time again in men, and isn't found; "Sometimes a man is a room I walk into/and won't find myself in", "The Latino Kid's eyes are a No Entry sign", "She watches him step out from the pulpit behind his eyes, the movement of a confessional curtain in his throat".


The women are equally absent, or in the process of disappearing into some vanishing point on the horizon. I love this image; "She looks at me/and does not see her daughter/has made herself absent as the man/who went to the store for milk and cigarettes and never came back, years ago".




The last sequence is spoken in the voice of the Burlesque star Bettie Page at the end of her career. She is heard here as well as seen; "If you listen hard enough/in the dusk you can hear my first cry/toiling along with the caw of a crow,/a sound that I must make to show I am here". Ah, affirming one of my favourite messages; about the necessity of being heard whether in writing or speech. But the last lines of the sequence give the note of plain, understatement that underpins the collection, alongside the plentiful similes and metaphors; "The work was fun and I like the outdoors/what more is there you need to know?".


This covetable, pink hardback would be a perfect Christmas present for someone who likes reading; even if they're not usually a poetry lover this wise, witty, sad, sexy, surprising collection could convert them