by Melissa Lee-Houghton

A lyrical exploration of excess, sensuality, desire, mental wellbeing, homelessness, metaphysics and impossible love. Written between Manchester, London and Sparty Lea, it interrogates a tumultuous career and a culture of fear and hypocrisy.

Exposure bears lyric witness to a woman and artist living under increasingly impossible social and personal conditions. These original and sophisticated poems are addressed to lovers, family, friends and imagined others. As well as being mischievous and biting critiques of contemporary poetry and wider culture.

Ideal Palace takes influence from Ferdinand Cheval's naive architecture. Exploring psychoanalysis, science and history wielded into a radical dreamscape. 

In a refusal to limit the work to conservative editorial standards this collection accommodates radical form — a landscape format for the long and unrestrained lines — embracing the full and vast vision of the poet.

Melissa Lee-Houghton won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2016. Her poem, 'i am very precious' was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Sunshine became a Guardian Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and the Ted Hughes Award. She is a previous winner of a Northern Writers’ Award for Short Fiction. Her novel, That Lonesome Valley was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Award in 2019. She is a Next Generation Poet and has written for Radio Four and the Guardian.