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Platinum Blonde
Platinum Blonde is Phoebe Stuckes’ debut collection. Whether wildly or wryly funny, each poem presents an episode in the up-and-down life of the wise-cracking party girl. On the surface, this is a world of dancefloors and bathrooms, glitter and girls, love and disappointment, but beneath the laughter and antics these are self-questioning poems. Poems about self-belief, self-image, vulnerability and insecurity, loneliness, trauma and survival.
Phoebe Stuckes has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019.
‘Phoebe [Stuckes], who is about to release her first book, Platinum Blonde, writes quietly unsettling poems about everything from gender stereotypes to explorations of selfhood in the age of hyperinformation.’ – James Patterson, i-D
'The poems in Platinum Blonde are vulnerable, performative, and ardently female. Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime: “This is how I want to die; in a boat, on fire / while Billie Holiday crawls out of a speaker.” And “Having an affair / is just getting all dressed up to cut yourself.” Get yourself a bottle of gin, some photos of your exes, and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read. You’re going to love this book.' – Kim Addonizio
‘Phoebe Stuckes’s Platinum Blonde is a relentless and relentlessly alive exploration of human interactions and very human desire, conveyed with a formal virtuosity and a real sense of the seduction of the imagination that is truly captivating.’ – Ahren Warner, Gregory Awards judge's comment
‘I enjoyed the deadpan-ness of the voice and the ways in which it established stereotypes and beauty standards, yet, poem by poem, undermined and destroyed them.’ – Inua Ellams, Gregory Awards judge's comment
'While most artists merely hold up a mirror to the world, Phoebe Stuckes is not afraid to shake the whole damn thing while doing so.' – Phil Jupitus
'"It's a rough time to be young / or to care about anything" in these sharp poems of lovesickness and collapse. Gin & Tonic is a cool, tense network of desolate punchlines and defiant shrugs, all configured round a warm and worn-out heart.' – Jack Underwood
'From compelling monologues to blues pieces, every poem is charged with a savage humour, building a world where "getting dressed feels / like being stood up" and "crying in cabs / could be glamorous / if I did it correctly".' – Helen Mort, on Gin & Tonic
Phoebe Stuckes has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet and Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019.
‘Phoebe [Stuckes], who is about to release her first book, Platinum Blonde, writes quietly unsettling poems about everything from gender stereotypes to explorations of selfhood in the age of hyperinformation.’ – James Patterson, i-D
'The poems in Platinum Blonde are vulnerable, performative, and ardently female. Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime: “This is how I want to die; in a boat, on fire / while Billie Holiday crawls out of a speaker.” And “Having an affair / is just getting all dressed up to cut yourself.” Get yourself a bottle of gin, some photos of your exes, and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read. You’re going to love this book.' – Kim Addonizio
‘Phoebe Stuckes’s Platinum Blonde is a relentless and relentlessly alive exploration of human interactions and very human desire, conveyed with a formal virtuosity and a real sense of the seduction of the imagination that is truly captivating.’ – Ahren Warner, Gregory Awards judge's comment
‘I enjoyed the deadpan-ness of the voice and the ways in which it established stereotypes and beauty standards, yet, poem by poem, undermined and destroyed them.’ – Inua Ellams, Gregory Awards judge's comment
'While most artists merely hold up a mirror to the world, Phoebe Stuckes is not afraid to shake the whole damn thing while doing so.' – Phil Jupitus
'"It's a rough time to be young / or to care about anything" in these sharp poems of lovesickness and collapse. Gin & Tonic is a cool, tense network of desolate punchlines and defiant shrugs, all configured round a warm and worn-out heart.' – Jack Underwood
'From compelling monologues to blues pieces, every poem is charged with a savage humour, building a world where "getting dressed feels / like being stood up" and "crying in cabs / could be glamorous / if I did it correctly".' – Helen Mort, on Gin & Tonic
64 pages, Paperback
First published September 3, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 2, 2020
These poems are like going to a great party. You're dressed up and know you look good, you're drunk and meeting all these new people: some are energetic and friendly, others are quick witted and caustic, and as with all parties someone surprises you by revealing a personal and tender part of themselves. You wake up the next day dressed in the same clothes and spend the next week unpacking that one wild night. You regret nothing.
May 7, 2021
Lovely. Flash, modern party girl poetry in the vein of Hera Lindsay Bird. I wonder if I’ll ever get sick of reading about my own problems in this medium.
April 19, 2020
A collection for any one who has stuck themselves in the eye with a mascara wand, for any one with chemical burns on their scalp or a high heel induced hairline ankle fracture.
April 28, 2021
This collection of poems on madness and being a mad person/mad girl was shades of myself in my 20s.
I will post "Mad Chicks Cool" once it publishes on the blog but I loved there being a kind of (self-)destructive camaraderie, something I usually found online and in a greater degree on adolescent psych wards.
I will post "Mad Chicks Cool" once it publishes on the blog but I loved there being a kind of (self-)destructive camaraderie, something I usually found online and in a greater degree on adolescent psych wards.
June 26, 2024
The cover was the best part of this collection.
June 15, 2022
Dreamy yet violent, poetry like a Lana del Rey song
February 15, 2021
As an ex goth that's dated a lot of men this is one of the most relatable collections I've read in a long while lol
November 3, 2020
An important new voice!
If I had to describe this collection in a few words, it would be "Wendy Cope for depressed millennials". It is pitch perfect, from the opening lines to the closing punches, with plenty of surprising, startling imagery along the way. Take this for an opening line: "He excites me the same way that Death does", and you immediately know that this is someone pining after a toxic boy, with darkness on their mind, but still going along for the ride. Speaking about a tattoo, Stuckes writes: "He likes this sort of thing: pain and long term consequences." Kept afloat by confessions of tragedy and romance, the collection is fundamentally the story of a young 20-something wandering the streets of London "looking for something to do." Along the way, the narrator finds madness, doomed relationships, cloying sex and her own reflection.
If I had to describe this collection in a few words, it would be "Wendy Cope for depressed millennials". It is pitch perfect, from the opening lines to the closing punches, with plenty of surprising, startling imagery along the way. Take this for an opening line: "He excites me the same way that Death does", and you immediately know that this is someone pining after a toxic boy, with darkness on their mind, but still going along for the ride. Speaking about a tattoo, Stuckes writes: "He likes this sort of thing: pain and long term consequences." Kept afloat by confessions of tragedy and romance, the collection is fundamentally the story of a young 20-something wandering the streets of London "looking for something to do." Along the way, the narrator finds madness, doomed relationships, cloying sex and her own reflection.
April 12, 2020
Stunning
Think of a thunderstorm over the Rockies. Wind, rain, rumbling thunder, illuminated by dazzling flashes of lightning. That's this book. It's not a gentle Spring rain; it's not a grey, drizzly affair. This is elemental.
So, that was a pretty good opening paragraph, wasn't it? I hope it got across just how much I admired and enjoyed this collection. Our author is smart, funny, honest, brutal, angry, sad, hopeful, wistful, wry, and tough - as are all of these poems. There might be some rigorous, pedantic, poetry-theory structure to the poems; I don't know enough about poetry to know if something deep and critically exotic is going on structurally. I just know that about every third line hit me like a hammer. (As Nietzsche would say, not as a sledge hammer, but as the hammer used to strike a tuning fork.) You react to these poems - maybe a smile, (some lines are witty and/or laugh out loud funny), maybe a frown, maybe a sigh, maybe, (most likely), a knowing nod.
These poems are honest. They read like they are the cries and confidences of a woman who has lived, who has seen her own life with wide open eyes, and who is not afraid to put it all on the page.
I don't know if this is at all technically correct, but here goes. I love the post-modern work of authors like Donald Barthelme. Fragments, phrases, seemingly odd and unconnected throwaway lines that all eventually fit together to create a mood and make a point. Clever wordplay, deadpan humor, and the poetic version of comedy "timing". The surprise word, or the untelegraphed mood and tone switch, that keeps you off balance but completely engaged. The touch of the absurd, and the odd and idiosyncratic metaphor. Well, that's what you get here, and the effect is, almost literally, marvelous.
These are also poems that implicate the reader. Even as I sympathized with the author's pain, anger, and fierce strength I wondered - have I ever been the bad guy?, have I ever caused this sort of fearful unhappiness? The author must have seen this coming, because toward the end of the collection she writes, (in "A good man is a humane mouse-trap"), -- "The good men enjoy my angry poems, so secure are they in the knowledge that they were not written about them." Hah, have I been caught and revealed? Has the author called my bluff?
So, I was thrilled to have found this. Believe everything good you read about it.
(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
Think of a thunderstorm over the Rockies. Wind, rain, rumbling thunder, illuminated by dazzling flashes of lightning. That's this book. It's not a gentle Spring rain; it's not a grey, drizzly affair. This is elemental.
So, that was a pretty good opening paragraph, wasn't it? I hope it got across just how much I admired and enjoyed this collection. Our author is smart, funny, honest, brutal, angry, sad, hopeful, wistful, wry, and tough - as are all of these poems. There might be some rigorous, pedantic, poetry-theory structure to the poems; I don't know enough about poetry to know if something deep and critically exotic is going on structurally. I just know that about every third line hit me like a hammer. (As Nietzsche would say, not as a sledge hammer, but as the hammer used to strike a tuning fork.) You react to these poems - maybe a smile, (some lines are witty and/or laugh out loud funny), maybe a frown, maybe a sigh, maybe, (most likely), a knowing nod.
These poems are honest. They read like they are the cries and confidences of a woman who has lived, who has seen her own life with wide open eyes, and who is not afraid to put it all on the page.
I don't know if this is at all technically correct, but here goes. I love the post-modern work of authors like Donald Barthelme. Fragments, phrases, seemingly odd and unconnected throwaway lines that all eventually fit together to create a mood and make a point. Clever wordplay, deadpan humor, and the poetic version of comedy "timing". The surprise word, or the untelegraphed mood and tone switch, that keeps you off balance but completely engaged. The touch of the absurd, and the odd and idiosyncratic metaphor. Well, that's what you get here, and the effect is, almost literally, marvelous.
These are also poems that implicate the reader. Even as I sympathized with the author's pain, anger, and fierce strength I wondered - have I ever been the bad guy?, have I ever caused this sort of fearful unhappiness? The author must have seen this coming, because toward the end of the collection she writes, (in "A good man is a humane mouse-trap"), -- "The good men enjoy my angry poems, so secure are they in the knowledge that they were not written about them." Hah, have I been caught and revealed? Has the author called my bluff?
So, I was thrilled to have found this. Believe everything good you read about it.
(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)
September 15, 2024
imagery a bit repetitive at times, but this collection is fun and tragic like something gone terribly wrong after a glamorous party. stuckes writes self-destruction as synonymous with love or desire akin to an old lana del rey record
September 10, 2020
Brilliant.
June 25, 2021
Every! Single! Poem! Had a line that made me have to sit down. Favourite book of 2021 so far.
August 9, 2021
Addinizio’s cover quote for ‘Platinum Blonde’ is well deserved and I imagine Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds being happy to endorse Stuckes’ collection, too.
I’m looking forward to her next collection.
I’m looking forward to her next collection.
September 18, 2024
I love poetry written by women , this was no exception
February 21, 2024
I read this more or less in one sitting. It tells filthy and chaotic tales about love and loss and social and sexual adventures, as well as pain and self-doubt and self-destruction all with a vigour and humour that’s electrifying.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews