Maryville

With a vividly sketched cast of
characters, award-winning poet Joelle Taylor uses the Maryville butch bar as a
lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The
violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are
rendered in awe-inspiring high definition in a collection as filmic as it is
familiar. A hybrid chronicle, magic trick, television series, prayer and
insurrection, Maryville conjures ghosts back
to their bodies, a community to their feet. The four butches
introduced in Cunto & Othered Poems return transplanted into the
Maryville bar in 1957 as teenagers. They bring with them stories of
incarceration, escape, and resilience - a quality that will mark their
friendship for the next 50 years. Through the Maryville’s darkened windows, we
watch the Gay Liberation Front stagger to its feet, a nascent women’s
liberation movement bite off its bindings, squat culture’s wild spread across
the city, the fight against Clause 28, the Brixton Riots, the Sex Wars and much
more. Inside, the Maryville has its own rituals, its own revolutions to
consider. More than anything the Maryville is a safe space to be dangerous.
Women find themselves in each other’s faces while outside Boy-Boy’s howl their
infinite carols.

Joelle Taylor
is the author of 5 collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent
collection C+NTO
& Othered Poems won
the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors.
C+NTO is currently being adapted both for theatre, and into a television
screenplay, and was featured on the Radio Three documentary Butch. She is a co- curator
and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre and tours her work
nationally and internationally from Queen Elizabeth Hall to Sydney Opera House,
from Australia to Brazil. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes
including the Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and
the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in
Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year.
Her most recent radio programme A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror was broadcast at the
end of last year on BBC Radio Four. In 2023 and 2024 she toured the UK as a
part of Blue Now, directed by Neil Bartlett and featuring Russell Tovey, Travis
Alabanza and Jay Bernard. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,
and a former Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured
with a DIVA Award for Outstanding Contribution and named in the 2025 Pride
Power list.