Feeling All the Kills

Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist and choreographer based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet ‘Somehow’ (Verve Poetry Press 2020) was a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet, and Poetry School Book of the Year (longlist, 2020). Her highly acclaimed anthology, ‘Eighty-Four’ (Verve, 2019) created in aid of the suicide prevention charity CALM, was a Saboteur Award shortlist, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year (2019). Her writing has been published extensively in journals and magazines, including the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland, Wild Court and many others. She was one of six poets selected to perform as part of the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony 2022, broadcast live to over one billion people around the world. Helen was awarded an honorary doctorate by Loughborough University in December 2023 for her ‘outstanding contribution to creative writing and work in raising awareness of issues related to social inclusivity’. She is Artistic Director of ‘Beyond Words’, a ground-breaking new company exploring text-to-movement translation.

‘Helen Calcutt’s Feeling All the Kills is radical, revolutionary, fearless in depicting women as sexual and maternal. These poems carefully record how women’s bodies can be dominated and controlled in the intimacy of the bedroom and the cold light of the hospital room when they give birth. This is something that we have to recover from, and these poems are extremely moving in mapping out that path from experiencing traumatic assault to opening to a lover, to one’s own child. Finding that closeness is life-altering, illuminating, astonishing: discovering the “quick light inside of me”. Calcutt’s poems have a descriptive power which illuminates a story that so many women will recognize and understand. How to trust and open up after violence. How to be autonomous and safe after violation. It is possible, these poems tell us: “I have become / my own hands holding. / My own eyes seeing // what strange and curious / newness, / what beauty.”’ Zoë Brigley, author of Hand & Skull