Memoirs. |
Daley-Ward, Yrsa |
Ward, Yrsa Daley- |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
---|---|---|---|
Searching... Mansfield Public Library | 811.6 DALEY-WARD | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize * Longlisted for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award
"Devastating and lyrical." -- The New York Times
"Suspenseful and affecting." -- The New Yorker
From the celebrated poet behind bone , a collection of poems that tells a story of coming-of-age, uncovering the cruelty and beauty of the world, going under, and finding redemption
Through her signature sharp, searing poems, this is the story of Yrsa Daley-Ward and all the things that happened. "Even the terrible things. And God, there were terrible things." It's about her childhood in the northwest of England with her beautiful, careworn mother Marcia; the man formerly known as Dad (half fun, half frightening); and her little brother Roo, who sees things written in the stars.
It's also about the surreal magic of adolescence, about growing up and discovering the power and fear of sexuality, about pitch-gray days of pills and powder and connection. It's about damage and pain, but also joy. With raw intensity and shocking honesty, The Terrible is a collection of poems that tells the story of what it means to lose yourself and find your voice.
"You may not run away from the thing that you are
because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you breathe."
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
The extraordinary, troubled life story of the model, actor and Instagram poet has a prose-poetry all her own Shortly after her collection of poetry, bone, was published in 2017, Yrsa Daley-Ward predicted that this memoir would be The truest thing Ill maybe ever write. It begins: My little brother and I saw a unicorn in the garden in the late nineties There may be truth in this memoir, but not in the traditional sense. But then, her writing is anything but traditional. Daley-Ward made her name as an Instagram poet, publishing short, pithy and deeply personal lines next to selfies and carefully curated images. It is a form that has enraged some poetry lovers and delighted many more, and The Terrible will probably have the same effect. It has echoes of Jeanette Wintersons Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Max Porters Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, but is uniquely itself. The Daley-Ward in the book reinvents herself several times; her story involves drugs, depression, sex work and modelling. She has devised a form that combines first and third person, poetry and prose, upside-down printing, and wincingly honest streams-of-consciousness about sexuality and physicality that sometimes make for difficult reading. Essentially, this is the story of Yrsa, the child of a Jamaican mother, Marcia, and a Nigerian father she never meets, who grows up in a northern English market town with her beloved brother, Little Roo. Early on, she realises that her body is dangerous, and she and Roo are shipped off to live with their Seventh Day Adventist grandparents something to do with a blue nightdress, and Marcias latest boyfriend. The power of sex, and the fear of it, are palpable. She writes: Im feeling dark red things and I dont know why. She feels pitch grey. The Terrible is a thing, never made explicit, that haunts her. There are times when the weird typography is inspired: a conversation between Yrsa and Roo, perfectly in tune, which bats dialogue between opposite margins; the occasions when despair and entropy make neat black lines dissolve into chaos. At other times the stylistic tricks seem unnecessary. Some readers will be put off by the start-stop nature of this extraordinary narrative. Others will be thrilled by its honesty. - Katy Guest.
Kirkus Review
A powerful, unconventionally structured memoir recounting harrowing coming-of-age ordeals.Though she earned acclaim for her debut poetry collection, bone (2014), Daley-Ward resists classification in this profound mix of poetry and prose. Her Jamaican mother was sent to live in England during her first, teenage pregnancy. Her father, whom she never met, was Nigerian, married to someone else. The author was raised entirely in England, largely by her maternal grandparents, Seventh-Day Adventists. She discovered her poetic calling on a pilgrimage to Africa, after drugs and depression had left her at the end of her rope. Before then, she had worked as a model and aspired to be a singer, though her most lucrative source of income was sex work. The one main constant in her life has been her younger brother, Roo, who attempted suicide after their mother's death. Roo had a different father than his sister, who had a different father than their older brother. Their mother subsequently had a series of boyfriends, some of whom played quasi-dad to the offspring none of them had fathered. "I think about these parents of ours / our makers / our stars. (Such impossible, complex stars.)," she writes. "How they came, exploded, / and fell away." Daley-Ward had developed well before her teens, both physically and mentally, so much that her mother feared her then-boyfriend would have sexual designs on her and sent her to her strict grandparents. She soon became aware of the attention her looks brought her, and she exercised her power to attract men and feared the power they might have over her. She abused alcohol and drugs, both to feel something and not to feel anything, and she found older men willing to support her. Then she got engaged to a man who truly loved her but whom she sensed she didn't deserve. "I don't think that I'll live a particularly long life," she writes. "It doesn't bother me. You gather speed when you're descending."The subtitle is apt: Daley-Ward has quite a ferociously moving story to tell. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
Girls & boys By Dennis Kelly. Performed live by Carey Mulligan. (Audible.) Kelly's play - part of Audible Studios' series of original productions .. staged at the Minetta Lane Theater in New York City's Greenwich Village - tells the story of a woman who has used manipulation and smarts to win what she has wanted in life. Mulligan's solo performance, captured here in audio, has been widely praised for its intensity. willa of the wood By Robert Beatty. Read by Emily Rankin. (Listening Library.) Returning to Serafina, his imagined magical world, Beatty presents a new middle-grade series revolving around the character of Willa, a young night-spirit who becomes stranded in the world of the day-folk, deadly force By Lawrence O'Donnell. Read by the author. (HarperAudio.) The MSNBC host revisits the 1975 police shooting of an unarmed black man in Boston. The victim's widow turned to O'Donnell's father as a lawyer for her case, the terrible By Yrsa Daley-Ward. Read by the author and Howard Daley-Ward. (Penguin Audio.) A coming-ofage memoir by the British model and writer who's achieved fame as an "fnstagram poet" of particular lyricism and bracing honesty. Indianapolis By Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic. Read by John Bedford Lloyd. (Simon & Schuster Audio.) The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War ? was the greatest naval disaster in United States history. Vincent and Vladic go beyond the disaster to describe the nearly 60-year fight to exonerate the ship's captain. "The country treated them as dangerous potential traitors by shipping them to internment camps, then abruptly expected them to take up arms for Uncle Sam. For some Japanese-American young men, the dissonance was too great and they refused. These 'no-no boys' went from the camps to prison to postwar limbo. John Okada chose to serve, but his 1957 novel no-no boy followed Ichiro Yamada as he returned home to Seattle from prison, bitter and filled with regret over his decision. The book, newly relevant today, evolves into a group portrait of immigrant parents and American children, conflicted veterans and no-no boys, those back home from the camps and those repatriated to Japan alike, all trying to move on from the same injustice. For me the most powerful character is the disillusioned war hero Kenji, who lost a leg and must watch as doctors amputate higher and higher as the infection creeps up the stump, 'whose terrible wound paid no heed to the cessation of hostilities.' Ichiro and Kenji cruise to Portland in an Oldsmobile refitted for the vet, trying to live up to the urgent request to 'prove to them that you can be an American worthy of the frailties of the country as well as the strengths.' " - NICHOLAS KULISH, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, ON WHAT HE'S READING.