Transformatrix

by Patience Agbabi

'They call me Jax, though my real name's Eva The whole of the Jackson Five rolled into one serious diva No.1 on the guest list, top of the charts When I make my grand entrance, the sea of sequins parts...'


From Hamburg to Jo'burg, Oslo to Soho, Patience Agbabi follows her critically acclaimed debut collection R.A.W., with Transformatrix, an exploration of women, travel and metamorphosis. Inspired by 90s poetry, 80s rap and 70s disco, Transformatrix is a celebration of literary form and constitutes a very potent and telling commentary on the realities of late twentieth century Britain. It is also a self-portrait of a poet whose honesty, intelligence and wit manages to pack a punch, draw a smile and warm your heart all at once.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Patience Agbabi (born 1965) is a British poet, author and performer. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Patience Agbabi was born in London to Nigerian parents, and from a young age was privately fostered by a white English family, who when she was 12 years old moved from Sussex to North Wales, where Agbabi was raised in Colwyn Bay. She studied English language and literature at Pembroke College, Oxford.

She earned an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education from the University of Sussex in 2002, and in September that year was appointed Associate Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Wales, Cardiff.

Agbabi was Canterbury Festival's Laureate in 2010. In 2018 she was Writer In Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Reviews

[Tara Betts]

I've read a few poems from Ms. Agbabi's first book R.A.W., and I feel so many of them would be more alive in my head if I could hear them. She's been a touring performance poet in the U.K./Europe since the 1990s. I appreciate how this book is more of a departure from that, but still has such incredible volleys of sound. Patience Agbabi is a great storyteller too, especially in the "Seven Sisters" sestina series (so much sibilance). I particularly like the sestinas "Martina" and "Samantha" and her ability to use the same six words in each of these sestinas in the same sequence with radically different female characters is even more admirable. She also plays with this idea of outer space and immigrant experience, especially for women with a balance of gravity and whimsy. This is particularly evident in "The Wife of Bafa," "Ufo Woman" (pronounced oo-foe) and "The Time Traveller." This idea of displacement and determining place emerges in her scenes of club life and pregnancy. Whether the person is flipping acid tabs to avoid thinking or unwinding from work that is a clear ability to show how these lives intersect in gender issues in poetic form (linking haiku, sonnets, palinodes and sestinas). It's a quick read that transforms into food for thought.

[Moira McPartlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this collection. Particularly the section called Seven Sisters where the poet writes seven Sestinas that all end in the same words - time, girl, end, child, boy, dark.

[ToriJaneReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quote(s): If you rub two words together you get friction/ cut them in half, you get a fraction." "my mother fed me rhymes through the umbilical,".

[Dane Cobain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Transformatrix is described as 'an exploration of women, travel and metamorphosis', and it serves as a witty collection of prose and poetry from a female poet in good standing in the modern British poetry movement.

If you're a fan of the work of Benjamin Zephaniah and his ilk of talented but unrecognised voices, you should probably give Agbabi's work a try.