Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit

Jen Campbell grew up by the sea. She is a bestselling author and award-winning poet. Her most recent books include a short story collection, The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night, a series of children’s picture books about a book-loving dragon called Franklin, and The Sister Who Ate Her Brothers (Thames & Hudson, 2021), a collection of gruesome tales illustrated by Adam de Souza. She won the Jane Martin Poetry Prize in 2013, received an Eric Gregory Award in 2016, is Vlogger in Residence for the Poetry Book Society, and was a judge of the Forward Prize in 2018. She talks about books, fairy tales and disfigurement at youtube.com/jenvcampbell. Her poetry pamphlet The Hungry Ghost Festival was published by The Rialto in 2012. Her first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2019. It was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category). She won the Spelt Poetry Competition 2022 for her poem 'The Hospital is Not My House' from her second collection, Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She lives in London.

These are poems which land the reader in the middle of a fantastical ocean and float them to shore on the precision and inventiveness of their imagery; these are poems that create their own mythspaces on the unstable edges of disability and chronic illness, poems which conjure new ways of articulating things about the experience of living in a body which might usually feel beyond language.

• 11 At First, the House Is Blue12 Anatomy of the Sea15 Dear [______] [1]16 The Hospital Is Not My House19 Dear [______] [2]20 The Hospital Is Not a Place for Bodies23 Dear [______] [3]24 For a While, the House Is Green25 The House of Mirrors Is Owned by the Freak Show26 The Body Festival27 Ghost-Whisperer28 Sometimes, The House Is Made of Glass29 Dear [______] [4]30 Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit31 Technical Rehearsal32 First Thing, I Am a Forest33 Dear [______] [5]34 Alopecia37 My Brain Is a Sleeping Thing38 We Must Admit, the House Is Pink39 Fell40 For Some Reason, I Can’t Stop Writing About Lighthouses41 In My Dream, the House Is Dark42 When I Revisit This Room, I Want to Leave Again45 Poem as Bad Doctor46 Somehow, the House Is Orange47 The Five Stages of IVF48 When It Arrives, It Weighs 5kg49 The Hospital Is Not Big Enough for the Two of Us52 Trying to Gain Entry into The Republic of Motherhood53 This Is Just to Say54 When I Go to the Woods55 The Weekend the Garden Reflected Our House56 The Trees Are Part of the Process57 Now, The House Is Red58 This Doesn’t Have a Name Yet60 The House Is All the Colours, All at Once61 Common Side Effects