Platinum Blonde is Phoebe Stuckes' debut collection. Whether wildly or wryly funny, each poem presents an episode in the up-and-down life of the wise-cracking party girl. On the surface, this is a world of dancefloors and bathrooms, glitter and girls, love and disappointment, but beneath the laughter and antics these are self-questioning poems. Poems about self-belief, self-image, vulnerability and insecurity, loneliness, trauma and survival. Phoebe Stuckes has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019.
Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset. She has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet. She has performed at the Southbank Centre, Waterstones Trafalgar Square, Wenlock Poetry Festival and she was the Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence in 2015. She has also read her work on BBC Radio 3. Her writing has appeared in The Rialto, The North, Ash and Ambit among others. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic (smith | doorstop) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. Her first full-length collection, Platinum Blonde, is published by Bloodaxe in September 2020. Her poem 'Thus I became a heart-eater' from Platinum Blonde won the Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2019.
Title: Platinum Blonde
Author: Phoebe Stuckes
ISBN: 9781780375021
Binding:
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2020-09-03
Number of Pages: 64
Weight: 0.1100 kg
The poems in Platinum Blonde are vulnerable, performative, and ardently female. Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime: This is how I want to die; in a boat, on fire / while Billie Holiday crawls out of a speaker. And Having an affair / is just getting all dressed up to cut yourself. Get yourself a bottle of gin, some photos of your exes, and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read. You're going to love this book. -- Kim Addonizio
Phoebe Stuckes's Platinum Blonde is a relentless and relentlessly alive exploration of human interactions and very human desire, conveyed with a formal virtuosity and a real sense of the seduction of the imagination that is truly captivating. -- Ahren Warner * Gregory Awards judge's comment *
While most artists merely hold up a mirror to the world, Phoebe Stuckes is not afraid to shake the whole damn thing while doing so. -- Phil Jupitus
