Women in Comfortable Shoes

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.

Selima Hill was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2022, with special recognition given to Gloria: Selected Poems (2008). This draws on collections from 1984 to 2006 and includes Violet (1997), which was shortlisted for all three of the UK’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, and Bunny (2001), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her most recent Bloodaxe collections are Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023).