A01=Suzanne Batty
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Author_Suzanne Batty
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DCF
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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Language_English
mental illness
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Price_€10 to €20
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softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781780374260
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 27 Sep 2018
- Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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States of Happiness, Suzanne Batty’s second full-length collection, begins with an extended sequence written in memory of her twin sister. This explores their relationship from shared birth to her twin’s early death from Friedreich’s ataxia, a rare degenerative disease. Suzanne Batty’s gifts of empathy and imagination combine to produce a profoundly moving elegy telling the hidden story of growing up as the “well” twin and exploring the meaning of illness and wellness in the light of her own experiences. The collection as a whole extends her range and probes more deeply her primary concerns - the uncertainty and necessity of love and the drive to find meaning and healing through the medium of language. The search for states of happiness, no matter how fleeting, is at the heart of this collection. These are poems which move from the everyday to the visionary, in which the physical world reflects changing emotional and perceptual states. Anarchic and sensuous, they fearlessly encounter both beauty and darkness, enabling a new and deeper connection with the world.
Suzanne Batty has published two pamphlets with smith|doorstop books, Shrink (1997) and Thirty at Thirty (2016), and two book-length collections with Bloodaxe, The Barking Thing (2007) and States of Happiness (2018). She won the Poetry Society’s Anne Born Prize in its inaugural year, 2015. She studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University and subsequently became a lecturer there. She has collaborated with musicians, visual artists, photographers and printmakers, and uses creative writing to support people experiencing and recovering from extreme mental distress. She lives in Manchester.
