Out of the doll's house and into the woods, Bunny Girls steps out of
the shadows of girlhood and looks at the world with wide eyes. Surreal,
spiky, wise and darkly funny, this new collection by Costa-winning
author and poet Angela Readman expertly mixes shades of film noir,
northern wit, and magic realism. Through the lens of childhood, these
poems address autism, anxiety, and darker concerns buried by cultural
ideals of femininity.
Here in Readman's skilful words are odes to severed heads, angels and
Disney villains, Marilyn Monroe's body double, squashed slugs, sexual
awakenings, Wendy-houses and snow globes, nosebleeds and blackbirds.
Women are both invisible and actively writing themselves into the
visible. Where there is isolation and dislocation, its counterbalance is
finding breathless, reckless joy in the acts of creation and
imagination. At its heart, this enlivening, magnificent book is about
darkness and light, the lovely and the frightening, the beautiful and
the worrying.
