Carolyn Jess-Cooke

El día de su muerte prematura e indecorosa, la vida de Margot Delacroix continúa bajo el nombre Ruth, ángel de la guarda de sí misma. Su misión consiste en repasar los duros acontecimientos de su vida. Sin cambiar ninguno de sus actos, descubre que sus decisiones han tenido mucho que ver con los problemas de Theo, su casi malogrado hijo adolescente. Al presentarsele a Ruth la oportunidad de cambiar el destino de su hijo, se encuentra con que los cambios que logra propiciar tienen unas consecuencias que nadie podria imaginar. Muy absorbente y completamente original. Si uno quiere que el tiempo vuele, ¡tiene que leer este libro! Rosamund Lupton Estos angeles nos gustan mucho porque son ajenos a la voluntad divina, los unicos que estan realmente de parte de los hombres. THE GUARDIAN

Shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010. This debut collection from Seren, Inroads, showcases a startling new talent. Carolyn Jess-Cooke has a sophisticated poetic intelligence as well as a great sense of fun. The opening piece, Accent where stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, "The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory...". This verbal fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are multi-faceted and often paradoxical. Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube is part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most up-to-date media platforms. After this playful start, a difficult childhood is evoked through metaphor in poems like Music Lesson,One Thousand Painful Pieces and Bitten, all the more heartbreaking for being indirect. Other high points are Newborn with the apt description of a babe in arms being a zoo of verbs/mewling, snuffling, pecking.... This sweet realism again gives way to metaphor, in the strangely evocative Dorothys Homecoming in a brilliant take on the classic film Wizard of Oz, the power of maternal love has turned into a twister. Readers will enjoy discovering this striking and versatile new voice.

"Jess-Cooke conjures (and there is a sense of enchantment or spellcasting present in the sensual figurative language utilised) precise, evocative imagery to discuss wide-ranging subjects, such as disability, feminism, the environment and motherhood, and creates a sense of travelling through experiences and environments" Ruth Stacey"The blend of heavenly and prosaic is glorious and terrifying." Judy Darley"Poems that are strong, yet empathic; steely, but compassionate. Its an extremely powerful admixture and I urge you to read it." Buzz Magazine. A brutal and pressing collection, We Have To Leave The Earth tackles gruesome yet important topics throughout her collection. The first collection playfully examines the Viking culture, with a strong temporal focus on ice in the arctic landscape. Jess-Cooke dedicates her next section to the erased voice of early feminist pioneer Josephine Butler, creating a rich history through a first person narrative. The theme of motherhood echoes from this section into the final beautiful collection as Jess-Cooke describes her own tale of motherhood and the perceptions of her autistic daughter.

The title poem of this new collection of poems by Carolyn Jess-Cooke: Boom! enacts the moment when the new baby arrives in the family like a hand grenade. Becoming a mother changed me in every single way, says the author, my first child - born in October 2006 - just about knocked me sideways. There were many reasons for this, but heres the biggest one: I could not believe how public and political the (hugely personal) experience of motherhood was. A noted academic, author of a book about film and Shakespeare, and a best-selling popular novelist The Guardian Angels Journal and The Boy Who Could See Demons, Jess-Cooke found, as many parents do, that the juggling act required to raise young children and continue a professional and creative life, is both exhausting and fulfilling. The poems chronicle the rapturous moments, such as Wakening where the baby is observed: the seedling eyes stirred by sunlight. There are also the tragi-comic Nights full of small elbows in the face and assailed by colds and colic. Jess-Cooke doesnt flinch from the darker fears and depressions that can afflict parents. There are also pieces of pointed satirical intent and socio-political comment such as Poem made from bits of Newspaper Headlines and The Only Dad in Playgroup. Viewing motherhood from a multiplicity of artful angles, the author says, Coupled with all this was the love I had for my children. It completely and utterly blew me away, how much I could love another human being.