Description
Book SynopsisPlatinum Blonde is Phoebe Stuckes’ debut collection. Whether wildly or wryly funny, each poem presents an episode in the up-and-down life of the wise-cracking party girl. On the surface, this is a world of dancefloors and bathrooms, glitter and girls, love and disappointment, but beneath the laughter and antics these are self-questioning poems. Poems about self-belief, self-image, vulnerability and insecurity, loneliness, trauma and survival. Phoebe Stuckes has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019.
Trade ReviewThe poems in Platinum Blonde are vulnerable, performative, and ardently female. Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime: “This is how I want to die; in a boat, on fire / while Billie Holiday crawls out of a speaker.” And “Having an affair / is just getting all dressed up to cut yourself.” Get yourself a bottle of gin, some photos of your exes, and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read. You’re going to love this book. -- Kim Addonizio
Phoebe Stuckes’s Platinum Blonde is a relentless and relentlessly alive exploration of human interactions and very human desire, conveyed with a formal virtuosity and a real sense of the seduction of the imagination that is truly captivating. -- Ahren Warner * Gregory Awards judge's comment *
While most artists merely hold up a mirror to the world, Phoebe Stuckes is not afraid to shake the whole damn thing while doing so. -- Phil Jupitus
Table of Contents9 Bleach 10 Carrie (1976) 11 Supermoon 12 Three spells 13 Monologue 14 Platinum Blonde 15 Bad Girls Club 16 Kiss me quick 17 Hell is a bus full of the men I’ve unsuccessfully tried to love 18 Advice for Girls 19 Sugar 20 Marshmallows 21 Blood 22 Stronger than me 23 Cassandra 28 Gold Hoop Earrings 29 Forgiveness 30 Why does he do that 31 Fear 32 Wolfish 33 Home 34 Blues 35 $$$ 36 Attempt 37 Look at me now 39 Fox 40 Disco 41 Bronski Beat 42 Romance 43 Sun Sign 44 Scorpion 45 Sext 46 BDSM 47 How to get over it 48 Proposal 49 Ghosts 50 Wet 51 Dinner 52 A good man is a humane mouse-trap 53 Kissing a girl in front of a Salvation Army church 54 Daughter 55 Thus I became a heart-eater 56 Purple Heart 57 Francesca Woodman 58 Pangea 59 Poem in which I leave and don’t come back 60 Lying 61 Is this thing on? 62 Confessional 63 Mad Chicks Cool
