Julie Egdell: Alice in Winterland. Poetry

Alice in Winterland is the story of a strange and subversive wonderland, of a worm who thinks he is a caterpillar and the Baba Yaga who became a witch. It’s a book about life in post-Soviet Russia, mad hatters, tears and temptations. It is a story of exile, heartbreak, loneliness and longing, about falling down a cultural and linguistic rabbit hole.

Julie Egdell has been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, Mexico and France in Bloodaxe’s Hallelujah for 50ft Women and Ek Zuban’s The Break-Out Anthology. She also features in theDark Matter 4 chapbook published by Black Light Engine Room Press. Alice in Winterland is her first full-length collection. She lives in Whitley Bay.

Growing up in Whitley Bay, Julie Egdell never knew how much she had in common with Lewis Carroll’s Alice. But when she went to work in St Petersburg she discovered that she was the spitting image of the Russian version of Alice – not Tenniel’s blonde school-girl, but the dark-haired ‘Alisa’ of Soviet illustrated children’s stories, sarcastic and cruel and very Russian. A new city, a new language and a new identity. What could possibly go wrong?

I watch boats come in.
Not so many as years gone by, but a few.
I am not an English rose
but a thistle on this bank,

hard and sharp.
In the northern city,
the only place I have
to call home.

(from: Collingwood)

Julie Egdell:
Alice in Winterland
Poetry
Publisher: Smokestack Books
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0995563594
ISBN-13: 978-0995563599
Released on December 31, 2017
Price: £7.95
Paperback
84 pages

# New poetry
Julie Egdell
• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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