**WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2019**
**
'Vivid, accessible and honest, sometimes uncomfortably so' Alan Bennett,
London Review of Books**
In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan
takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the
different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities.
Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that
shape us - eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity - the poet
examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people's, to chart
our progress towards selfhood.
McMillan's award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a
poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands
that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of
the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling
intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always
taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own
physicality. 'isn't this what human kind was made for', McMillan asks in
one poem, 'telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of
touch'. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the
spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us,
perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.
