House of Books & Friends is thrilled to welcome Ellora Sutton on Wednesday 6th of May from 6pm to discuss their new poetry collection, ‘Little Bitch’.

Ellora will be joined by Betty Doyle, author of poetry collection ‘Fruits of Labour’, and Roma Havers, author of poetry collection ‘The Natural Way’. There will be 8-10 minutes of reading from the poets, and 20-30 min discussion with chair, Stuart Bartholomew. There will also be a Q&A, and an opportunity for attendees to get their books signed.

About Little Bitch

Little Bitch hangs out in cemeteries, art galleries, hot-pink nuclear bunkers. She ruins your favourite movies and won’t stop talking about how hungry she is, horses, roses, her dead mother, the sea. She watches too much Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She is a Venusian hellhole. She is too pretty to cry.

Ellora Sutton’s hotly-anticipated debut collection is an unsettling exposé of wasted potential, the precarity of desire, and the violence of girlhood. With cameos from Hello Kitty, Susan Sontag, Tony Hawk, and Marina Abramović, Little Bitch uses a powderpuff to serve up a suckerpunch with a side of Black Forest gateau.

About Fruits of Labor

Betty Doyle’s Fruits of Labour charts coming to terms with childlessness, from initial symptoms and diagnosis, grief and uncertainty, to emerging with acceptance, hope, and survival. Doyle explores the impact of childlessness, and the threat of infertility on the speaker’s sense of self, femininity, and family. While initially the body is examined from a place of shame and regret, it also becomes a site of resilience and abandon.

There is joy here, too – in the unexpected freedom that childlessness brings. Doyle rejects enforced gender roles, embracing independence and freedom of choice. While the body in these poems can be a site of suffering, or even viewed by some as deficient, it is also defiant, and ultimately, these poems emerge triumphant, surviving and thriving on the speaker’s own terms.

About The Natural Way

‘We’re trying the natural way’, Havers once said when asked about children in their queer partnership. What follows is their sparklingly disruptive debut, drawing on inside jokes, ironies and imaginings for new ways of thinking about what we call natural and the ways and paths we choose to get there.

From Oscar Wilde to an unlikely pelican, this book’s wandering way resists the traditional nature poem, instead digging into the muck and rock of queer wilderness. Formally inventive, these poems span the width of the page and draw on mathematics, tablecloth patterns and swimming pools for their structures. Ingenious and funny, Havers’ debut questions received ideas about inheritance and legacies: what if, it asks, we live outside the familiar, familial archive?