Strip

by Angela Readman

Sugar and Spice and All things nice?Is that what little girls are made of?Magazines, lippy and a push-up bra?Porn star, sex symbol, victim or whore? What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? Are we born girls? Or are we the products of what has gone before? Strip reveals the lives of 50's pin-up Bettie Page, hardcore porn stars and the little girl left behind on the way with stunning beauty and poignancy. The poet is not afraid to go beyond the boundaries of taste, and ask what lies beneath images we both admire and demonise. The strong voice of these sensitive and powerful narratives manages to find a sad beauty within lives. These cinematic poems are political in the most subtle sense as they explore the intimacy of power relations, gender, and unpick notions of glamour to find the tale behind the glossy centrefold. The work is a tapestry of how femininity is created, culturally and individually, exposing how the girl on stage stitches together her personae, and then strips her down layer by layer.Poems that refuse to shy away from the dark, the grotesque and the taboo, but lead us, through an interplay of beautifully crafted, sensuous language, striking visuals, voice and often devastating observation to bring us face to face with the 'other' in ourselves. The true shock in these haunting narratives is that these lives speak to all of us about family, sex, power and love.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2007

About the author

Angela Readman is a twice shortlisted winner of the Costa Short Story Award. Her stories have won the National Flash Fiction Day Competition, The Mslexia Short Story Prize, and The Fish Short Memoir Prize. They have also been shortlisted in the Manchester Fiction Prize.

Her debut story collection Don't Try This at Home was published by And Other Stories in 2015. It won The Rubery Book Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She also writes poetry: her poetry collection The Book of Tides was published by Nine Arches in late 2016. Angela's debut novel, Something Like Breathing​, will be published by And Other Stories in 2019.

Reviews

[Nik Perring · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Strip' is mostly a poetry collection. It's about sex.It's about porn (one of the poems is about an actress who performs with animals and there are others about Bettie Page - someone I previously knew very little about). And it's brilliant. It's honest. It cuts to the truth of things. It's about being female and about what's often expected. It's raw and it's beautiful and it's wonderfully sad. And it's written beautifully, Angela Steadman is clearly a master (or mistress!) of words and of language.

Perhaps my favourite section was 'The Porn Star Letters'. They're written by a young girl, in the midst of her sexual awakening, to Traci, a porn actress (or star). That bit broke my heart a little and reminded me of Caroline Smailes' Black Boxes in its use of language and the way it was brilliantly affecting.

A brilliant, brilliant collection.

(Originally appeared here: http://nikperring.blogspot.com/2010/1... )

[annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review of Strip was published on Stride Magazine website