EATING MY GRANDMOTHER: A GRIEF CYCLE

Jessica Dean Marketing UQP

Poetry
Krissy Kneen
Poetry | ISBN: 978 0 7022 5374 4 | July 2015 | B-format paperback | 104 pp | $24.95
UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 24 JUNE 2015

First Poetry Collection Brings Award-winning Results

Following the death of her grandmother, Australian novelist and bookseller Krissy Kneen turned to the art of poetry for the first time. Grief-stricken by her loss, she found herself unable to work on her latest novel, and became obsessed with writing poetry about her grandmother. The resulting poems won 2014’s Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry and are now published for the first time.

As a child, Krissy was very close to her grandmother, Lotty Kneen (Dragitsa Marusic). Lotty led an eventful life, emigrating to Australia from Slovenia, via Egypt and the UK, with her husband and two daughters in the 1950s. She kept her children close to her and raised her grandchildren as her own. This poetry collection captures their shared lives together and expresses the pain and loss of losing the one woman who held their world together.

‘The book was written in the strange suspended months after the death of my grandmother,’ says Krissy. ‘Poetry was like a new language I learned to speak in the bleak heart of grief. I had never written poetry before but suddenly the flow of verse was unstoppable. I felt like I was possessed.’ She wrote poems before work and in the evenings, and even woke up dreaming of lines to write.

‘To understand what was happening to me I began to read poetry. My world began to open to new possibilities. I discovered Anne Carson and Sharon Olds. I discovered other voices I longed for and ones that felt like they were in harmony with the voice I found only in grief.

‘The process of writing this book was the strangest event in my life. The death of my grandmother opened a vein in me and poetry poured out.’

PRAISE FOR EATING MY GRANDMOTHER

‘Raw and exhilarating, Eating My Grandmother embodies the visceral paradox of grief.’ – Kristina Olsson, award-winning author of Boy, Lost
‘This year’s winning manuscript enacts an imaginative razoring of the seams of conventional mourning. At once exquisitely sensitive and blazing with wit and experimentation, Kneen re-imagines elegiac poetry.’ – Judges’ Comments, Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of the memoir Affection (Text Publishing), which was shortlisted for the Qld Premier’s Literary Award in the non-fiction category, and the 2010 ABIA award for Biography of the Year; Triptych: An Erotic Adventure (Text Publishing, 2011); and the literary novel Steeplechase (Text Publishing, 2013). The novel that she was trying to write early in 2014 when poetry moved in, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, was published by Text earlier this year. She has written and directed short films and broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC television, and has had short stories published in literary journals, books and magazines including Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Nerve.com, The Big Issue, Best Women’s Erotica 2014, Women of Letters and The Lifted Brow.