Bear

Chrissy Williams is a poet, editor and tutor based in London. Her work has been featured by the BBC and her first book-length collection Bear (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was one of the Telegraph's 50 Best Books of the Year. The author of numerous pamphlets, her work has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award, and published in many magazines and anthologies including Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry London and Salt's Best British Poetry series. She is editor of the online poetry journal PERVERSE. She is also an improviser and edits comics, including the New York Times bestselling The Wicked + The Divine. Her second book-length collection, Low, is due from Bloodaxe in 2021.

'Chrissy Williams is my new favourite poet. These poems are as close and intimate as a bear breathing down your neck, about to take you in its arms or tear you limb from limb; as strange and unexpected as a bear playing the piano and as beautiful and inexplicable as love.' - Luke Kennard; 'In spite of its almost absurdist character and apparent playfulness, Chrissy Williams's Bear is a collection of poems that deal with all that is most serious in human life. From start to finish, these wonderfully various, entertaining and original poems speak the language of compassion, intimacy and faith.' - Annie Freud; 'A pleasure in pluralism.' - Richard O'Brien Poetry London

• 11 Bear of the Artist 12 LOVE 13 Gone 18 Robot Unicorn Attack 19 JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION in the Spring 20 The Lost 21 Green Lake 22 Bliss 25 On Getting Boney M's Cover of 'Mary's Boy Child' by Harry Belafonte Stuck in my Head 26 Sheep 27 Groundhog Day 31 Poem in Which I Respond to Notes in the Margins of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Selections 33 Bedroom Filled With Foam 34 Over Dave's Trousers 35 Jam Trap 36 Where Have You Put The Wine? 37 Four Hours Away 38 Digital Ghost Towns 40 Reading Your Comics in Eype 41 The Burning of the Houses 42 Menagerie Speeches 44 Monstrous Ham 47 There is an Epigraph 48 Moorhens 50 Art Imitates Life, but Life Imitates TV 51 Murder, She Wrote 53 Manifesto Based on Notes from Lars von Trier's Five Obstructions 54 Tigers