Caroline Bird

The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.

The Air Year

Proud

Sara W. Briller

The High Cost of Keeping Women Down

Born Female

Trouble Came to the Turnip

In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel? And what could possibly go wrong?

Chamber Piece

Suhayla El-Bushra

Chris Thorpe

Lulu Raczka

Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter, Clytemnestra must try to stop him, Iphigenia must accept her fate, the Chorus must watch. Ships lie dormant in harbours, and thousands of troops sit on the shore, growing restless and unruly. Helen is gone, and pursuit of her has been stalled by windless seas. To raise the winds to send his fleet to Troy, Agamemnon is commanded by the gods to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. But his deceit of his wife, Clytemnestra and the killing of his child, will end up tearing him and everything around him to pieces. Euripides’ story of a father moved to murder his daughter, Iphigenia at Aulis, is one that has been reinvented and retold anew throughout history. The Iphigenia Quartet sees four of the UK’s most exciting and radical playwrights - Caroline Bird, Suhayla El Bushra, Lulu Raczka, and Chris Thorpe – create explosive responses to this classical tragedy. Each play is a reimagining this story of familial catastrophe from the differing perspectives of the key characters in the play: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia and the Chorus.

The Iphigenia Quartet

Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. Her characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.

The Hat-Stand Union

Sara Welles Briller

The oldest way of classifying people is to divide humans into male and female. The thesis of this work is that the conditions of modern life--especially those related to the birth control pill and the nature of work--render old forms of the sexual division of labor obsolete, even dysfunctional; and the sooner we get rid of them, the better all around. To allow sex to be the defining characteristic for classifying and organizing work is incredibly wasteful to society: wasting talent, ability, and creativity. The crux of her argument, which is documented with a comprehensive collection of statistics, is that the country's prosperity depends on the labor and earnings of women, yet they are consistently underpaid and underprivileged in comparison with men, which is wrong.

Following Looking Through Letterboxes, her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. Trouble Came to the Turnip confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing for granted. Her poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Caroline Bird's world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake. And the turnip.

Hapless Herbert Hoover chose the term "depression" because he felt it did not have the fright potential of such established terms for financial disaster as "panic" or "crisis." This, and 1001 other facts have been rescued from the near oblivion that blankets the '30's in popular histories (or in tribal memory), and the buried gold of essential facts are burnished with personal anecdote and vivid passages from the contemporary record -- speeches and newspaper features. The title is the thesis, and this book contends that this willfully forgotten period has affected national attitudes and individual behavior with changes in politics, social welfare, employment, selling, marriage, women, and styles of dress, decor and decorum--along with failures to change. If your invisible scar twinges on hearing the refrain from "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" you should take the time for this -- it tells you why.

Caroline Bird

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