Love / All That / & OK

Really intelligent, coquette, fuck-you work - a space for a new kind of anti-misogynism in poetry. - Marianne Morris High electrics and considerable. - Allen Fisher [Emily Critchley] has incorporated influences from popular culture and from a more-streetwise feminist critique. [H]er poetry - is combative, intellectual and probing but this seems tempered by an upbeat and more popular sense of engagement, which makes her unusual and interesting. - Stride Magazine Her formally adventurous poetry implicates its author in, then deftly upends, the conventions - political, sexual, intellectual, and emotional - that threaten to diminish the purview of any fierce, bright, 21st-century female. Critchley practises a brisk vernacular anti-lyric, often in the name of love and always in a language that (pounding Pound) 'hath 'ham' innit.' As an antidote to a future that 'may be very wrong,' these poems are absolutely right. - Jean Day

Emily Critchley was born in Athens, Greece, and grew up in Dorset. She studied at the Universities of Oxford, Bristol and Cambridge. From Cambridge she gained a PhD in contemporary, American women's experimental writing and philosophy, and was the recipient of the John Kinsella & Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize in 2004. She now lectures in English & Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

Poems for Luke I have been thinking Supper is done Honeymoon After Tikrit The Sonnets A Final Sonnet (for Luke) 'Dear Luke, It's 5.15 p.m.' 'We've been indulgent... ' 'The experiment was me trying...' 'I took it for a "door"...' 'In summer...' 'You jerk you didn't...' 'Luke, I can no longer...' 'God bless you Luke...' 'Not home to myself this evening...' 'O stayer~putter...' 'You're such a flake...' Avec fond memories Ain't gonna work on our farm no more Poems for Other People For Susana Gardner For Seaton (after Ashbery) For Josh (after 'oooo the air is full of thought') from Hopeful for Love are th'Improverish'd of Faith 'Content-Specific' My notes / Notes about me Perhaps Other Reasons To his Uncool Mistress (after Marvell) The Triumph of Misogyny from Some Curious Thing Past Filmic Tense 'the throwback to the tunnel...' 'otherwise one could ask...' 'if e.g. in the past...' 'While the past 30 years...' 'here the arches may narrow...' 'less a port from the storm...' Past Mythic Tense 6 (The Avaunt Garde) 'otherwise one might have to ask...' from Who handles one over the backlash Waiting When Expectation Relinquishes Underneath Itself Of All The Surprises: A Love Poem for Seaton from When I Say I Believe Women Dear America The sense of falling from I just want you to know that we can still be friends In translation 8 In this world from How To Make Millions cuts that I do & mouth a lot Happy [not enervated] from The Dirt Glitch Land Alter Affair Not misrepresenting but even producing being produced by its very nature (Re.vision)