Sunshine

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2016 I made him listen to a song I loved and he cried like he’d never cried in his life that this girl with cuts on her skin would have liked to hold him, crawl into his psychiatric ward bed and breathe all over his damp, white shoulders. Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psychiatric wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain. Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton's poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, poems that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems, Melissa Lee-Houghton shines a light on human ecstasy and sadness with blinding precision. The collection includes the poem 'i am very precious' - shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016. One of the most striking and challenging voices in contemporary poetry Melissa Lee-Houghton published her first collection of poetry, A Body Made of You in-between stints in and out of psychiatric hospital and both this and the follow-up volume Beautiful Girls draw heavily on her own experience of mental illness. One critic described her work as ‘soaked in the tension between body and mind, between who we are supposed to be and the god-awful gorgeousness of who we really are.’ ‘Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted: it will survive as testament to poetry's force in overcoming’ - Chris McCabe 'Sunshine reaches deep into the part of us we don’t want to look at and is all the more powerful, gut-wrenching and vital because of it.' - James Rhodes