Hannah M. Teasdale - Poetry Publication

‘Indelicate Sundays’

Published: Tuesday 17th October 2023

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Wednesday 10th April 2024, 7.00pm - Satellite of Love and Black Eyes presents the launch of Hannah M. Teasdale’s ‘Indelicate Sundays’.

The night also featured readings from a selected list of guest poets:

Nick Lovell
Derek Dohren
Helen Sheppard
Josephine Lay
Melanie Branton

Through a series of stark, vivid snapshots this sizzling, brave work doesn't just offer glimpses of Hannah's life, but instead leads us right to the depths of humanity. In true Teasdale form, Indelicate Sundays deals with the difficult head on, with unflinching and admirable honesty. Yet Hannah's turn of phrase is delicate and the poems are exquisitely crafted. Hannah's poems burn with white hot intensity and buzz with the undertow of yearning. The themes of fracture and loss circle the book, bleeding through every word, yet Hannah's unbreakable spirit and strength breathe life into the darkest of times and the book leaves you feeling uplifted.  This poignant insight into a tortured life will leave you breathless and reeling and stirred to the very core. - Holly Winter-Hughes

Hannah packages her trauma, vulnerability and strength into perfectly formed punches, the likes of which, you don’t realise have landed, until you’re knocked out. Brilliant. -  Giovani Esposito

Hannah Teasdale’s third collection of poetry charts a fractured life which starts when her mother announces they are leaving home. Leaving to a cold house with a ‘filthy’ bed a secret hobby of stealing things begins; ‘my first desire to take things that aren’t mine,’ but ‘I never take more than I feel owed.’ This start of a secret compulsive shame continues through teenage years into adulthood. The young girl feels lust when she looks at a photo of her grandfather as a young man then realises her knickers are wet when he burps after dinner. The adult woman keeps a score card of how long it has been that her lover hasn’t given her an orgasm and the mistress persuades her lover to get ‘an eye test’. Hannah’s poetry is surprisingly shocking but delicately direct. There are no happy endings. A relationship boils down to two facts; ‘We go to therapy. You take your pills’ and her child’s trousers smell of another woman's house. Life has become a ‘chaos of bent documents.’ She has become a mother who has left home and is crying for her lost child. - Dr Lucy English

"If Anais Nin and Shane Meadows met at a bar to write prose and poems it may well end up like this book. An awareness of vulnerability is a strength and Hannah Teasdale expresses this with power and insight whilst creating an urban cinematographic vibe of working-class life without for one moment feeling sorry for itself or filing itself under a label. I also respected the straight talking yet structured poems like Glass Eyes and Untouched and how Teasdale doesn’t give a shit about avoiding the parallels of exploitation versus the innocence of a sexual and emotional awakening from child to adolescent to woman/human." - Anthony Owen

A straight-talking, direct and utterly beautiful collection from a poet confronting the hard realities and joyous dreams of contemporary human existence. Teasdale navigates an eventful journey from child to adulthood in all its ambiguity and shock. Shot through with violence, tension, tenderness and love, her poems don’t shy away from examining the beauty, terror and often difficult outcomes of decisions taken. Connections are made and broken, relationships soar and strain, secrets are hidden and laid bare. Teasdale faces the consequences head-on, and we are caught up in the force of her thoughts -whether trying to make sense of death as a child, how sex changes the dynamics between adults, or considering the stance of the ‘other’ woman in a relationship with a married man. Indelicate Sundays is a collection that is by turns unsettling and surprising, rooted as it is in a questioning world of childhood dreams and nightmares, and adult fantasies. Yet Teasdale’s poetic voice is one of surety and celebration. She is unafraid to draw on aspects of her life to speak to us all, and we are carried along with her in solidarity and wry recognition. The poems revealingly hark back and career forward, in a striking and unexpected style that is enlightening and immensely satisfying. It is no understatement to say that “these poems shimmer”. -  Sara-Jane Arbury

Hannah M. Teasdale

In 1976, Hannah was born and ‘hard-raised’ in Birmingham where she was taught the Fine Art of poor decision making. 18 years later, she was ‘shot’ to the Soft- South-West where she put into practice all she had learned.

In recent times, now in Cambridge, she is ‘Mastering’ the Fine Art of unlearning.

 Hannah now identifies as a work in progress; there’s no guilt, shame or inadequacy attached to ‘letting go’. This is Hannah’s third collection – a last-ditch attempt to learn from all those poor decisions.

 Book Cover Design: Jason Conway - thedaydreamacademy.com