Additional information
by Joanne Limburg (Author)
Joanne Limburg wears comic camouflage to stalk serious subjects, from envy and guilt to bereavement and its tangled aftermath. Her often boisterous poems celebrate the defiant vulnerability of modern women, exploring their lives as daughters, mothers, friends and rivals, as well as the never-ending struggle to keep body and soul on speaking terms, while under attack from within and without - whether by boredom, depression, insomnia, indigestion, oppression, mirrors, misogyny or just other people. Her poems address the experience of being a Jew in the West at this point in history, with an awareness of the debt she owes to stubborn and resilient ancestors. This sense of a rich inheritance is reflected in her voice, which draws on English-language poetry but also on nursery rhymes and everyday speech, on hymns remembered from school and the cadences of synagogue and Jewish household ritual. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection.
Author Biography
Joanne Limburg was born in London in 1970, and studied Philosophy at Cambridge. She has since gained an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, worked as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University, and was the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalen College, Cambridge, from 2008 to 2010. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998, and her first book, Femenismo (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Paraphernalia (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third, The Autistic Alice, is due from Bloodaxe in 2017. Her other books include The Woman Who Thought Too Much (Atlantic Books, 2010), a memoir about OCD, anxiety and poetry; Bookside Down: poems for the modern, discerning cyber-kid (Salt Publishing, 2013), an anthology for younger readers; and one novel, A Want of Kindness: a novel of Queen Anne (Atlantic Books, 2015).
