Carolyn Jess-Cooke – författare

The film sequel has been much maligned in popular culture as a vampirish corporative exercise in profit-making and narrative regurgitation. Drawing upon a wide range of filmic examples from early cinema to the twenty-first century, this exciting new volume reveals the increasing popularity of, and experimentation with, film sequels as a central dynamic of Hollywood cinema. Now creeping into world cinemas and independent film festivals, the sequel is persistently employed as a vehicle for cross-cultural dialogue and as a structure by which memories and cultural narratives can be circulated across geographical and historical locations. This book aims to account for some of the major critical contexts within which sequelisation operates by exploring sequel production beyond box office figures. Its account ranges from sequels in recent mainstream cinema, art-house and ‘indie’ sequels, non-Hollywood sequels, the effects of the domestic market on sequelisation, and the impact of the video game industry on Hollywood. The book:*Situates the sequel within its industrial, cultural, theoretical and global contexts.*Offers an essential resource for students and critics interested in film and literary studies, adaptation, critical theory and cultural studies.*Provides the first study of film sequels in world cinemas and independent film-making.

I first met my demon the morning that Mum said Dad had gone. 'My name is Alex. I'm ten years old. I like onions on toast and I can balance on the back legs of my chair for fourteen minutes. I can also see demons. My best friend is one. He likes Mozart, table tennis and bread and butter pudding. My mum is sick. Ruen says he can help her. Only Ruen wants me to do something really bad. He wants me to kill someone.'

She thought her life was over, but it hadn't even started ...When Margot Delacroix dies at forty-two years old, she is sent back to earth as a guardian angel - to herself. Renamed Ruth, she is forced by divine mandate to re-experience and record her biggest mistakes and fiercest regrets from the beginning of her life to her untimely death. Forced from the moment of her birth to witness the cogs of fate and the stuttering engine of free will, Ruth sets out to change the course of her life, and, ultimately, to prevent her premature death. When she realises that the reasons behind her teenage son's descent into drugs and murder lay within her own actions as Margot, she makes a pact with a demon - she will give up her place in Heaven in exchange for the opportunity to save her son from his fate. But the changes she makes result in consequences no one could expect...

This collection of essays examines the ways in which recent Shakespeare films portray anxieties about an impending global wasteland, technological alienation, spiritual destruction, and the effects of globalization. Films covered include Titus, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, Almereyda's Hamlet, Revengers Tragedy, Twelfth Night, The Passion of the Christ, Radford's The Merchant of Venice, The Lion King, and Godard's King Lear, among others that directly adapt or reference Shakespeare. Essays chart the apocalyptic mise-en-scenes, disorienting imagery, and topsy-turvy plots of these films, using apocalypse as a theoretical and thematic lens.

The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel's investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that hold it up as a kind of figurehead of Hollywood's commercial imperatives. An invaluable resource to the film student, critic, and fan, Second Takes offers new ways of looking at the film sequel's industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts.

The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel's investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that hold it up as a kind of figurehead of Hollywood's commercial imperatives. An invaluable resource to the film student, critic, and fan, Second Takes offers new ways of looking at the film sequel's industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts.

1.'Boom' by Carolyn Jess-Cooke is the title poem of this new collection from Seren Books that focuses on motherhood: the baby arrives in the family 'like a hand grenade' and nothing is quite the same again.

Seren books is thrilled to announce Writing Motherhood: A Creative Anthology on Motherhood and Writing. A much-needed exploration of motherhood as both political space and a complex personal experience, this book’s skewering literary portraits of contemporary motherhood contend with the tender and torturous issues raised when a woman dares to do both.

We Have To Leave The Earth is Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third collection and features a tripart collection of poems on interlocking themes. The first third of the book is ‘Songs for the Arctic’ and looks closely at the ice-landscapes being eroded by climate change. Their beauty contains a dark premonition of the future of our planet once these grand seas of ice melt. The poems are written in short, declarative lines, their rhythms echo Norse myth and arrive in single syllables.The second section deals with more personal themes, a daughter who is diagnosed with Autism and whose future is therefore also in peril, yet who seemingly transcends the flat terms of a diagnosis and displays more imagination than authorities expect, inventing a ‘craze’ amongst her friends for an imaginary fish-friend. Such glimmerings of essential hope appear often in this passionately serious, darkly glittering collection. The third part of the book is a nine-poem series that is a portrait of a Victorian activist, Josephine Butler, who, after the death of a daughter, is galvanised to campaign for public causes and to have a brutal law, that allowed intimate examination of girls and women who were suspected of venereal disease, struck from the books. It is a history of courage and compassion in the face of much establishment resistance.We Have To Leave the Earth is a beautifully moving collection of poems:, thoughtful, topical, and expertly composed.

This debut collection showcases a startling new talent. Originally from Northern Ireland, now based in England, Carolyn Jess-Cooke has a sophisticated poetic intelligence as well as a great sense of fun. The opening piece, 'Accent' where 'stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own' is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory...A". This verbal fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are multifaceted and often paradoxical. 'Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube'is part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most up-to-date media platforms. After this playful start, a difficult childhood is evoked through metaphor in poems like 'Music Lesson','One Thousand Painful Pieces'and 'Bitten', all the more heartbreaking for being indirect. This pain contrasts with the redemption that mature love brings, that 'watches memories burn'in poems like 'Pure' and 'Lip Service' and 'First Time Buyer' that are marvellously 'aslant' poems of passionate attachment. 'Belmopan, Belize' shifts into realism, giving us a chillingly accurate account of a car accident. In other 'travel' poems like 'Jet Lag' and 'Tourists' the restlessness and vertigo of travel mirror an existential state. The two set in Japan, 'Reading Mt. Fuji's Diaries' and 'Waterfall at Lake Chuzenji, Japan', are curious and haunting narratives, suggestive of multiple meanings. Other high points are 'Newborn' with the apt description of a babe in arms being a 'zoo of verbs/mewling, snuffling, pecking...'. This sweet realism again gives way to metaphor, in the strangely evocative 'Dorothy's Homecoming' in a brilliant take on the classic film 'Wizard of Oz', the power of maternal love has turned into a 'twister' all encompassing and 'terrified by her loss'. Any exhausted new mother will also recognise the surreal musings in the saga 'Asda, Ten Days Post-Partum'. Readers will enjoy this striking and versatile new voice.