All the Twists of the Tongue

by Cathleen Allyn Conway

From publisher:

Like many creative writing undergrads, I got a fair amount of poetic inspiration from Sylvia Plath. Arguably, too much. And when I left college, her work was one of only a couple things I continued studying (the other being the American Civil War, but that’s another story). Anyone with a passing knowledge of Plath knows what a shit her husband (Ted Hughes) was and that, besides her suicide, the biggest tragedy was that control over her work went to Hughes and his sister. He edited her final collection of poems, Ariel, and her journals. In publishing the latter, Hughes removed some passages he didn’t think were fit for public consumption; many painted him in a bad light.

Cathleen Conway has crafted a collection of found poems using these removed fragments as source material. All the Twists of the Tongue is a masterful work that shapes the voice of Plath into something else . . . familiar but different. Being Plath-based, the poems include a healthy dose of darkness, but there’s a winking lightness when the poems brush against the mythology. Like in “Bildungsroman” . . . “I know about / the pirated Sylvia. Ego and Narcissus. I resent pirated Sylvia.” Lovely.

From “Falcon Yard”:

“It is a narrow-minded way of looking at things:
ugly raised wrist-scars, no false notes.

So nasty and cruel and calculated—
how he praised this in me.

I was guilty of an indiscretion…
what a fool one is to sincerely love.”

22 pages, Chapbook

First published November 30, 2018

About the author

Cathleen Allyn Conway, PhD studied creative writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is a Gothicist and Sylvia Plath scholar who has presented her research in the US, UK, and mainland Europe.

She is the author of Bloofer (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), Nocturnes (Cherry Dress Chapbooks, 2023), American Ingénue (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), All the Twists of the Tongue (Grey Book Press, 2018) and Static Cling (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in the UK, US, and Australia.

As a journalist, her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sun, the Financial Times, Bitch, the i paper, the Daily Telegraph, and the Sunday Telegraph.

Cat is also a fully qualified teacher of secondary English and has taught KS3-KS5 in inner London secondaries and further education colleges, as well as poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London. Once upon a time, she also played bass and sang in a band called The Kissing Time.

Originally from Chicago, she lives in London with her partner and son.