This collection of lyric essays by award-winning poet Kim Moore explore the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet – confronting the implications of being a female on public display, with the connotations of sexual objectification, in a context that traditionally disregards the body. Kim states “With the strides and gains made through the #MeToo movement, I believe the time is right for a book like this to make an impact. As a female poet, I know there is a need for such a book to examine the intersection between writing, performing, feminism and sexism. I wish this book had been written when I first started working as a freelance writer and I’ve had many conversations with other female poets who have also confirmed my thinking – that female poets are navigating these things regularly, and yet nobody is really writing or talking about them.”   The book draws on her experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All the Men I Never Married. It is a balance of memoir, academic treatise and poetry, though the author’s emphasis is on writing in a popular way and making the subject accessible to a wide audience. To achieve this her models have been Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life.   The book’s subjects include heckling at poetry readings and other interactions; problems with the ‘male gaze’ and what the ‘female gaze’ might look like in poetry; ‘guilty for being a man’: how guilt can be useful if it can bring about change; how writing poetry about sexism can shed add meaning to the term; the objectification of men and women, and ‘bad faith’ arguments.

Kim Moore, in her lively debut poetry collection, The Art of Falling, sets out her stall in the opening poems, firmly in the North amongst 'My People': "who swear without knowing they are swearing - scaffolders and plasterers and shoemakers and carers - ". 'A Pslam for the Scaffolders' is a hymn for her father's profession. The title poem riffs on the many sorts of falling "so close to failing or to falter or to fill". The poet's voice is direct, rhythmic, compelling. These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, they are not designed to soothe or beguile. They are not designed with careful overlays of irony and although frequently clever, they are not pretentious but vigorously alive and often quite funny. In the first section there is: a visit to a Hartley street spiritualist, a train trip from Barrow to Sheffield, a Tuesday at Wetherspoons. The author's experience as a peripatetic brass teacher sparks several poems. The lives of others also feature throughout, including a quietly devastating central sequence, 'How I abandoned My Body To His Keeping': is the story of a woman embroiled in a relationship marked by coercion and violence. These are close-to-the-bone pieces, harrowing and exact. The final section includes beautifully imagined character portraits of John Lennon and Wallace Hartley (the violinist on the Titanic), as well as Jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and the poet Shelley and other poems on: suffragettes, a tattoo inspired by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and a poetic letter addressed to a 'Dear Mr Gove'.