Feeling All the Kills - (Pavilion Poetry) by Helen Calcutt (Paperback)

About the Book

Feeling all the kills is a dazzling and ruthless series of poems where the physicality and rawness of the moment lives and breathes. Here is a collection of burning defiance - self-enquiring and brilliant, Calcutt reveals herself as a unique and critical voice on issues of sexual identity and womanhood.

Book Synopsis

Feeling All the Kills is a dazzling new collection that breaks the poet's silence on what it means to experience and live in the wake of a violent assault and rape. Calcutt weaves stunning musicality with raw, unhindered storytelling, as the poems both collectively, and in their individual power, explore the distinctly connected, yet fractured selves of 'sexual being', 'mother' and 'abused person'. Through the poems' breathtaking and vital vocabulary Calcutt brings the physical, emotional, and sexual nuances of life to the foreground, with strength, subtlety and beauty, and courageously harnesses a sense of ownership over such a lasting trauma. At the heart of this collection is a personal desire to navigate a way back to a sensual, whole-feeling self, to shamelessly 'feel all' -- with authenticity and power.

Review Quotes

'Feeling All the Kills is a generous, powerful book, helpful for both poets and for those who have been wounded. There is no toxic optimism here - just truth, body and life, which, Calcutt reminds us in 'Listen', 'is beautiful and damaging enough ... dazzling and damaging enough.'

Mslexcia, Reading for Writers

'Feeling All the Kills is about how trauma shapes the soul. Calcutt bears witness to a life "dazzling and damaging enough", in which tenderness is always haunted by brutality. Her imagery reveals how sexual violence imposes itself upon the everyday, so that even the trees seem to have their hair "roughed against headboards". But these poems are also fierce and beautiful in their resolve to heal. Helen Calcutt has talent to burn.' Clare Pollard

'Helen Calcutt's Feeling All the Kills is radical, revolutionary, fearless in depicting women as sexual and maternal. These poems carefully record how women's bodies can be dominated and controlled in the intimacy of the bedroom and the cold light of the hospital room when they give birth. This is something that we have to recover from, and these poems are extremely moving in mapping out that path from experiencing traumatic assault to opening to a lover, to one's own child. Finding that closeness is life-altering, illuminating, astonishing: discovering the "quick light inside of me". Calcutt's poems have a descriptive power which illuminates a story that so many women will recognize and understand. How to trust and open up after violence. How to be autonomous and safe after violation. It is possible, these poems tell us: "I have become / my own hands holding. / My own eyes seeing // what strange and curious / newness, / what beauty."' Zoë Brigley, author of Hand & Skull

'Who else does this? Calcutt's is an otherworldly stutter, a slipping-in-and-out-of visceral vulnerabilities, a speaking-at-the-brink-of utterance and archetype, where love, sex, childbirth, mothering all loom and lean with darkness intact. Plath hovers in audible range; Sharon Olds, too, murmurs; but Calcutt's bell jar comprises an altogether smokier, metaphysically more refractive glass.' Mario Petrucci

About the Author

Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist and choreographer based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet 'Somehow' (Verve Poetry Press 2020) was a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet, and Poetry School Book of the Year (longlist, 2020). Her highly acclaimed anthology, 'Eighty-Four' (Verve, 2019) created in aid of the suicide prevention charity CALM, was a Saboteur Award shortlist, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year (2019). Her writing has been published extensively in journals and magazines, including the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland, Wild Court and many others. She was one of six poets selected to perform as part of the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony 2022, broadcast live to over one billion people around the world. Helen was awarded an honorary doctorate by Loughborough University in December 2023 for her 'outstanding contribution to creative writing and work in raising awareness of issues related to social inclusivity'. She is Artistic Director of 'Beyond Words', a ground-breaking new company exploring text-to-movement translation.