Photo: Courtesy of Kath Andrews
Sue Finch - Poetry Publications
Welcome to the Museum of a Life
Publish Date: Monday 15th April 2024
Official Launch: Thursday 9th May 2024 - Doors TBC - Script Haven, Worcester…. Black Eyes presents in conjunction with Script Haven, a Hybrid Event, the launch of Sue Finch’s new collection, ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’, support TBA, Hosted by Josephine Lay.
This is Sue Finch’s second collection with Black Eyes and takes its title from the poem, Museum of a Life. The poem itself was originally selected for publication in the anthology, ‘Queer Writing for a Brave New World’ published by Out on the Page and is based on the idea of a person’s life being exhibited for others to see. Each gallery in this book is themed and features carefully curated exhibits for the reader to peruse. There is a chronology to the different displays leading from a child falling into a pond to an adult contemplation of the preparation of a funeral buffet. Gallery 4 features poems formed from pandemic dreams and nightmares.
On entering this Museum of a Life, feel free to wander at will. However, don’t miss a single gallery, as every exhibit invokes a small part of the life of Sue Finch. By the time you leave the museum for the Gift Shop to buy a blue apple for your mother, you will know her well.
'Sue Finch’s voice is both steady and questioning as she sets down the archive of her life…. Each exhibit feels like a very personal and off-kilter chronicle of a collective memory where wolves and silence stand with their backs to the corners of the theatrical space of a museum cabinet… Helen Ivory
‘Ponds, pitfalls, pandemics, peacocks, pelicans and funeral preparations. On view in Sue Finch’s second collection is a kaleidoscope of memory, moments, fears and desires, curated in a lyrical museum…
This is a Daliesque ramble through the gardens of life… Welcome to the Museum of a Life is triumphant with its directions, distractions and dancing Deathwatch Beetles…’ Damien B Donnelly
‘At once mindful and surreal, these poems take us on a journey through the Museum of a Life, passing from childhood, through vivid everyday events, to love and dreams, and to considerations of mortality…
Unsentimental yet tender, this collection is an original and imaginative celebration of the temporary treasures of life, and of the human condition.’ Ivor Daniel
Full quotes to be found at the back of the book
Magnifying Glass
Book Launched, online, via Zoom, Saturday 17th October 2020, 7.00 - 9.00pm
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Sue Finch’s debut collection, Magnifying Glass, focuses the lens on moments in time and carries the reader from childhood through to adulthood. The title poem recalls one of her brother’s experiments in the garden with his new magnifying glass and its ability to focus sunlight to make fire. The poems are at times dark (Hare Mother reflects on a woman leaving an abusive relationship), occasionally twisted (The Red Shoes is a fairy tale inspired poem that begins with a meeting in a shoe shop) and often poignant (No Second Chance recounts an autobiographical moment where poor use of an axe to chop wood has unforeseen consequences). The final poem, Graphene, is a love poem as well as a celebration of carbon atoms.
Reviews
Sue Finch’s poems are flesh on the skeletons of folktales. They are inhabited by creatures who breathe quietly in the human dusk. They are tender, straight-talking, yet can catch you off-guard with their slanted pathways. - Helen Ivory
Sue Finch is a writer of great versatility. Her wide repertoire includes poems that startle and shock with their strong themes (suicide, heartache, trauma within the family), and also quirkier, observational poems, poems which celebrate a star gazing brother, or try to bring the moon down from the sky for a lover.
What all her poems have in common however, is a charge and electric current, language that (in the words of Dylan Thomas) lifts off the page, vivid and immersive imagery and a rich musicality and a fresh new reading of fairytale and ancient tales.
To read Sue is to be transported to other worlds, not just the gorgeous yet unsettling lands of the Hare Mother, the Red Shoes or a traumatised Rapunzel, but to worlds in which the everyday is transformed into the stuff of myth and legend.
A glorious and transcendent read from a poet with a fiercely original vision of the world, and a strongly developed imagination. - Anna Saunders, Cheltenham Poetry Festival Founding Director.
'Sue Finch’s poems have the ability both to beguile and shock you with their humour, tenderness and darkness. Her confident dexterity with language and voice scoops the reader up and deposits them firmly in the world of her poems, whether that be family history, domesticity or an old fairy tale seen through new eyes. Sue’s writing is vivid; it's curious. Her poems question and challenge the reader to be curious too; it’s a challenge well worth accepting.' - Georgi Gill, Editor, The Interpreter’s House.
Book Cover Design: Jason Conway - thedaydreamacademy.com
Available via Bookshop.org , all Amazon platforms, Worldwide, as well as, to order, from bookshops and other booksellers, Worldwide, via the major wholesalers.
Sue Finch - Biography
Sue Finch likes all kinds of coasts, peculiar things, and the scent of ice-cream freezers. She lives with her wife in North Wales.
Her first published poem appeared in A New Manchester Alphabet in 2015 whilst studying for her MA with Manchester Metropolitan University. She won second prize in the ‘Wild Words Single Poem Contest’ in 2020 with Flamingo, a poem which then went on to be included in her debut collection, Magnifying Glass, and to be recorded for iamb. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022 by Black Bough Poetry, and nominated for Best of the Net in 2023 by The Broken Spine.
Her work has appeared in a number of online magazines including: The Interpreter’s House, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Dear Reader, One Hand Clapping and IceFloe Press.