Jenna Clake's Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes, and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying: public and private jars of peanut butter, a tray of lemons, unfurling chocolate bar wrappers. In turning to television, childhood films, and social media accounts, her collection investigates how to reveal and conceal, what it means to have a secret, to be intimate, to navigate something that should be natural, but feels sickly, sour, and wrong. Museum of Ice Cream is Jenna Clake's second collection, following her debut Fortune Cookie (2017), winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, which was also shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award.
Jenna Clake was born in Staffordshire in 1992. Her debut collection of poetry, Fortune Cookie, won the Melita Hume prize in 2016, and was published in 2017 by Eyewear. It received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2018, and was shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award in the same year. Her pamphlet of prose poems, CLAKE/ Interview for, was published by Verve Poetry Press in 2018, and was featured as a spring pamphlet in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in 2019. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Women Poets' Prize, commended in the University of Hertfordshire Single Poem Prize, and placed second in the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2018. Her second full collection, Museum of Ice Cream, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2021. Jenna is writer in residence for ORCA, writing on cetacean conservation, marine mammals, and whale watching. Her poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, The Poetry School, The Compass and The Poetry Review. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham and lectures at Teesside University.
Title: Museum of Ice Cream
Author: Jenna Clake
ISBN: 9781780375458
Binding:
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2021-04-22
Number of Pages: 64
Weight: 0.1100 kg
The trajectory between Clake's debut collection and Museum of Ice Cream is logical but still beautifully unexpected: the linguistic precision and surreal swerves are stronger than ever, but something deepens and resonates as the voice transitions from instructive, to consoling, to lost, often within the same stanza. These are poems of such sadness and grace; fear transfigured by a powerful imagination into endlessly explorable terrains. Not so much to guide as to reach out to you in your own maze of confusion, wonder and dread; which is all I ever really ask of poetry. -- Luke Kennard
