The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider

by Janis Freegard

Alice Spider is a spinner of words, dancing them around until some spill on to the page. She’s both your one true friend and a trollopy little tart. Alice the Webster is weaving herself a wild, wild life. This prose poem sequence includes drinking champagne in a hot air balloon, an exploration of surrealism and an unusual encounter with a burglar. Welcome to Alice’s labyrinthine web.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Janis Freegard was born in South Shields, England, and spent part of her childhood in South Africa and Australia before her family settled in Aotearoa New Zealand when she was 12.

Her most recent publication is a short story collection: 'Wild, Wild Women', published by At The Bay| I Te Kokoru after she won a competition for the manuscript.

Her novel, 'The Year of Falling' was published by Makaro Press in 2015. Her poetry collections are 'Reading the Signs' (The Cuba Press, 2020), 'The Glass Rooster' (Auckland University Press, 2015), 'The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider' (Anomalous Press (US) 2013) and 'Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus' (Auckland University Press, 2011). She is also a co-author of AUP New Poets 3 and is widely published in journals and anthologies in New Zealand and elsewhere.

She is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award and lives in Wellington with an historian.

Reviews

[Rowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This chapbook excerpt of a full-length manuscript is New Zealand author Janis Freegard's first US publication, and I can't wait to see more of her available to us! I love this book - Alice is bewitching, smart, angry, schizophrenic, and irredeemably charming. Mercurial and entrancing, I can't help but feeling like Alice is a little bit me, or I am a little bit Alice, and perhaps that everyone is a little bit Alice, and if not they should be because the world would be a far more interesting place.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janis Freegard is an excellent New Zealand poet who features an alter ego called Alice Spider in many of her poems. This US-published chapbook brings together a number of the Alice Spider poems: with Janis' permission, I published one as a Tuesday Poem on my blog, and it gives you a good feel for the surreal, quirky, and often funny world of Alice Spider: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.co.nz/2...

[Sarah Kosch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Spider, the star of Janis Freegard's poetry, wears leather and lipstick, rides air balloons, and has a breakup with her other personality. She is fearless and full of doubts, a hero, and mostly just us.