Wildlife

Roll up, roll up for my 22nd and very last date of the Better Houses  tour in Abergavenny on Sunday 22 April at 11.30am!   Susie Wild reads from her new volume of poetry, talks about writing it, and discusses questions raised by the audience. She says:  ‘I will be reading from my debut poetry collection. Better Houses is about the places we inhabit in life, about relationships and the extraordinary in the everyday. It has all the key subjects: birth, death, sex, love and loss. At the book’s core, it is as much about moving house as it is about trying to centre yourself somewhere, to find a place to call home, to be still. I have moved at least every six months to two years in my adult life, sometimes through choice and often not. This draws on those experiences of packing and unpacking boxes, but it also employs fiction, humour and imagination. Other poems escape fires and great white sharks, test beds and language barriers and hunt fossils and comets, spells a...

Well that was a Laugharne Weekend! Thanks to the lovely  Meinir Min Evans  for having us at the beautiful draped The Forecourt Fringe on Saturday and Sunday. Such a pretty stage to perform on. Thanks to my co-host, driver and star poet  Natalie Ann Holborow  and to my wonderful readers including  Oliver James Lomax ,  Mari Ellis ,  Rhys Owain Williams , Tyler Keevil,  Sion Tomos Owen ,  Anne Pelleschi  and  Lee Prosser .  Beautiful music from Sion and the man forever to be known as Tyler's (no good) brother. Thanks to Emyr Young for the photo studio Parthian is 25 shoot, and to  Jeff Towns  and  Huw Davie  for the book bus gig and gifts and to all of you who bought our books / us drinks and entertained/charmed/impressed us over the weekend.  I also really enjoyed seeing other acts at The Laugharne Weeke nd as well including  Euros Childs (favourite gig of the year so far), Joe Dunthorne, ...

This is going to be great! Readers added include  Mari Ellis ,  Natalie Ann Holborow ,  Mark Blayney ,  Rhys Owain Williams ,  Tracey Rhys ,  Lee Prosser  plus music and readings from  Siôn Tomos Owen  and Tyler Keevil and his brother. More TBA! We are there 11am-12noon Sat and 11am-3pm Sun (music on Sunday too) and as a bonus, I'll be reading too. Come along! (Friends who fancy reading too drop me a line and I'll see if I can fit you in).

My hair is on fire: My name on a blackboard: My fellow poets:

I was feeling a bit of a grumpy gigging gypsy and I decided a change was needed. So, these plus bleach and this became this... My friend's daughter cut my fringe too, it is straighter than it looks here, she is a trainee hairdresser. I like it.

Edward Doegar reviewed Better Houses for the new issue of Poetry Wales , here's the start of the review: "As the title hints, Susie Wild’s book Better Houses touches on some of the pressing concerns of the era (the housing crisis, social inequality). In ‘Gentrifying the Area’ she reflects on the rate of change (‘three short months’) that puts ‘tumbledown terraces’ ‘on / the up, like the house prices’. The poet reflects on her part in the process. She presents herself as the artist type whose cultivation of an area increases its value: Thank us with our strawberries and herb garden, our five runners, beany social climbers, racing each other up bamboo to blue-sky investments, blue-sky returns. Forced out in search of lower rent, the poem ends: ‘There are worse ways to be going, going / gone.’ It’s an interesting angle to take and reflects the book’s insistence to make the most of things, being whimsically enthused or tuttingly aggrieved with one’s (al...

New Welsh Review Reviewed Better Houses , here's an extract: Wild clearly has a sense of fun. Her poem, ‘Pub Crawl Date’ – cataloguing a nine-pint epic evening out – had me chuckling out loud. So too, ‘The Bed Testers’. But, in my view, Wild is at her best when she is more serious and, to this end, there were several stand-out poems. [...] Similarly, there is a Plath-like forensic quality to ‘The Lash Museum’ which I also really enjoyed. It opens with ‘A gutsy Cornish wind / slammed the caravan door shut, / skinning a birthmark, / my head / a blood fountain.’ The poem’s protagonist is then raced to hospital for attention and when the stitches are removed, she keeps them as morbid reminders of her pain: ‘clumped lashes a-flutter / in a plastic pot.’ Buy Better Houses for £8.99 from Parthian

NEW POETS: SHOWCASE Emily Blewitt, David Foster-Morgan, Susie Wild, Katherine Stansfield, Stephen Payne. Seren Poetry Editor Amy Wack introduces these mostly Cardiff-based poets who have all published acclaimed first collections in recent years. Duration: 1 hour Location: The Pantry Cafe, Cornerstone, Charles Street, Cardiff Type: Poetry reading For event information contact Amy Wack: 07943-819271 Buy £5 tickets

Sophie Baggott has reviewed Better Houses for Wales Arts Review and she calls the poems: ' exuberant and smart [...] Half-remembered, half-invented, but wholly charismatic.' Read the review in full on Wales Arts Review

Happy New Year lovelies, l bring you more details on  my next reading in Cardiff in some excellent company :

Oh what a joy it was to be in Laugharne in the gentle quiet of December to wrap up the Better Houses tour. They treat their poets well there. The evening reading was cosy and informal, with us going around the room and each reader standing to do one piece, interspersed with four short sets from myself. There were some wonderful readings including an inventive collaborative piece with 'music'. Afterwards we were easily persuaded to try all the gin and prop up the bar talking talking talking until close. Now I a m wrapping up work before the gift of a long festive break to get myself back to human ready for 2018! My next 2018 gigs are as follows: FEBRUARY 17th: New Poets Showcase, Seren/Cornerstone’s Poetry Festival, Cardiff (11am)  21st: Open Mic Spoken Word Extravaganza at Ye Olde Murenger House, Newport (7.30pm) MARCH 14th: Satellite of Love, The Greenbank, Easton, Bristol (8.30pm)  APRIL 22nd: Melville Centre, Abergavenny ...

' Perhaps this is the message she wants to leave us with, the importance of opening doors and allowing for reintegration within an individual as well as across relationships through decency and kindness.  Readers of all types will find something marvellous here.' – Mary Jacob reviews Better Houses on gwales.com

I had a lovely time at Can Openers in Bristol this lunchtime, reading poems from Better Houses and listening to a very high standard of open mic. Thanks so much for having me along, and to those of you who bought my books. The event is held in a dance studio at The Station, where I have fond memories of seeing exciting circus happenings when I used to live in the city. I thoroughly recommend this event, as a very supportive space for new readers too. For more info see:  http://www.poetrycan.co.uk/new-events/1613-canopeners-2.html For once I didn't take any photos, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened!

Cardiff Life interviewed me and you can read it in the new issue, out today, and my name is on the cover!

Apparently this is what I looked like at last night's reading... 

I'll be reading a few poems at Lloyd Markham's event at the Full Moon with other performers and musicians... Come along! Here's the poster: Following that I will be giving a lunchtime reading at Can Openers in Bristol on 1 December, and then hosting and reading at Brown's Poems & Pints in Laugharne on 7 December... Then I'm taking a little festive season break before returning with gigs in Carmarthen, Bristol, Cardiff, Newport and more in 2018. Susie x

Hello Lovelies, How are you all doing? Great, I hope! I am almost back to 100% and ready to kick off the tour again this Saturday 25 November by hosting Wild Words at The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia, London . This is the London launch for Better Houses , in my birth city, so I will also be reading, but before that I will be introducing some wonderful writers from Parthian Books and our friends. Here are the bits and bobs: Join us for an afternoon of poetry from Wales and the World at The Wheatsheaf. We will be featuring poets with links to London and Wales and poetry in translation published by Parthian Books and their friends.  Poets performing include Eleni Cay (A Butterfly's Trembling in the Digital Age, Parthian, 2017 in translation from Slovakian), Christina Thatcher (More than you were, Parthian Books, 2017), Rebecca Parfitt (The Days After, Listen Softly London, 2017), and Tracey Rhys (Teaching a Bird to Sing, Green Bottle Press, 2016). More special guests T...