<p>An Anatomical Venus - which gives this book its title - was an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealised woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men who studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking. Helen Ivory's new collection The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as 'other'; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with 'Housewife Psychosis' recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others shut inside cabinets of curiosity.</p>

The Anatomical Venus

Literature & Fiction

Ivory, Helen

Poetry

Bloodaxe Books

Waiting for Bluebeard tries to understand how a girl could grow up to be the woman living in Bluebeard's house. The story begins with a part-remembered, part-imagined childhood, where seances are held, and a father drowns in oil beneath the skeleton of his car. The girl enters Bluebeard's house paying the tariff of a single layer of skin. This is only the first stage of her disappearing, as she searches for a phantom child in a house where Bluebeard haunts the corridors like a sobbing wolf. Waiting for Bluebeard is Helen Ivory's fourth book of poems.

Waiting for Bluebeard

<p>Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her fifth Bloodaxe collection is "The Anatomical Venus" (May 2019). She edits the webzine "Ink Sweat and Tears" and teaches online for the UEA/NCW creative writing programme. A book of collage poems, "Hear What the Moon Told Me" is published by KFS. "Maps of the Abandoned City" is a sequence of her new poems, previously unpublished in book-form.</p>

Maps of the Abandoned City

SurVision Books

Sandra Leveson

Arts & Photography

Leveson, Sandra

Individual Artists

Craftsman House

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