A Suburb of Heaven (Flap Pamphlet) - Softcover

Shinebourne, Pnina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1905233523 ISBN 13: 9781905233526

Publisher: Flipped Eye Publishing Limited, 2017

Synopsis

A Suburb of Heaven is a collection built from observation and speculation. Based on artist Stanley Spencer's work in the first section and the part-imagined life of Anna O, patient zero of psychoanalysis, in the second, it is a feast for the senses. Spencer's predilection for using Biblical scenes in a rural context carries a narrative impetus that Pnina Shinebourne builds on to create revelatory poetic highs, "half-way between drunkenness and reverie". These moments of altered reality perhaps lead inevitably to the sequence on Anna O, which starts with the curiously apt line, "Transference, said Freud". From that opening, Pnina invents Anna O's history, complete with music notes and linguistic asides. The imagery here is soft against what was sold as hard science; a struggling patient's emotions set against the speculating notes of ambitious men.

About this title

About the Author

Pnina Shinebourne was born and grew up in Israel. Her pamphlet, Radioactive, was published in 2013 and her second pamphlet A Suburb of Heaven, won the 2014 Venture Pamphlet Award. She also won the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2014. Her first collection is forthcoming in 2017 with Smokestack Books. She teaches psychology at Middlesex University and lives in London.

Review

"A very ambitiously conceived [pamphlet] that succeeds beautifully as poetry on its own terms and for its own sake... inviting readers to peer into strange funhouse mirrors." - Dr Lauri Ramey, California State University, Los Angeles

About this edition

• Publisher: Flipped Eye Publishing Limited
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1905233523
• ISBN 13: 9781905233526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 46