Selima Hill – författare

The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence is the account of a young woman''s stay in the psychiatric ward of a large hospital. The only time she feels safe is when swimming; the only place, the sea, preferably underwater. Selima Hill''s 17th book of poetry – her 14th from Bloodaxe – takes her back to the territory of her third book, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1983), but this revisiting is quite different in style and mood. Over thirty years later, ''this brilliant lyricist of human darkness'' (Fiona Sampson) is more able to chart and illuminate ''extreme experience with a dazzling excess'' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

''Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry...Despite her thematic preoccupations, there''s nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill''s work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon...using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama...hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn... So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry – not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics'' – Fiona Sampson, Guardian.

''Hill, more than any other English poet, cranks out angry, impotent, abused and richly surreal Britain. And she is very very funny...fresh, fierce and convincing... A mood-swinging voice, talking to itself rather than to the reader, shows how pain and joy transform the material world'' – Claire Crowther, Poetry London.

''Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine... Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess'' – Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets.

Hot on the heels of her previous collection Men Who Feed Pigeons, Selima Hill''s Women in Comfortable Shoes is the 21st book of poetry from "the UK''s Emily Dickinson". 

This collection presents eleven contrasting but well-fitting sequences of short poems relating to women, including: Fishface, in which a disobedient young girl is sent to a Catholic convent school to give her mother a break; Fridge, in which trucks, geese and fridges speak of death, grief and absence; and Girls without Hamsters, which deals with an older woman''s obsession with a spider-legged young man.

Writing with her trademark wit and originality, Selima Hill looks closely at the complications and contradictions that define our lives and relationships.