Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading: Denise Riley
Event WebsiteThe Bristol Poetry Institute, with the support of the Department of English and School of Modern Languages, are very pleased to present Denise Riley as this year’s annual reader. The event will last one hour and comprise of a poetry reading and a question and answer session. A 20-minute book signing with the poet will follow the reading.
Over the last five decades, Denise Riley has steadily acquired the reputation of being, in the words of Simon Armitage, ‘one of the best poets around’. Sarah Perry, writer of The Essex Serpent, and Max Porter, writer of Grief is a Thing With Feathers, each called her 2016 volume, Say Something Back ‘the best thing I’ve read in ages’, while Robert Macfarlane declared the book’s ‘heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years’. 2022 saw the much anticipated publication of its successor, Lurex. The evening promises to be enjoyable, thought provoking and moving.
Denise Riley lives in London. Her prose books are War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother [1983], ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History [1988], The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow [2012]. Poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 [with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017], Lurex [2022].
Please direct any enquiries, including matters of access, to poetry-institute@bristol.ac.uk.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
