Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale presents the history and current state of a critically neglected, significant body of contemporary writing and places it within the wider social and political contexts of the period. Ranging from Geraldine Monk’s ventriloquizing of the Pendle witches to Denise Riley’s fiercely self-critical lyric poems, from the multi-media experiments of Maggie O’Sullivan to the globally aware, politicised sequences of Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke, David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy theorise women’s alternative poetries in terms of Julia Kristeva’s idea of ‘women’s time’ and in terms of the female poetic voice constantly negotiating with dominant systems of representation. They also offer a much-needed re-theorising of the value of avant garde practices.

Through this important book length study, Kennedy and Kennedy extend and update a valuable line of critical reading of women’s experimental poetry represented by Perloff, Linda Kinnahan and Clair Wills in the 1990s, and more recently by many of the critics who contributed to the Salt Companion to Maggie O’Sullivan.

Eltringham, D., Jenkins, Source: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry