Talk a Blue Streak

This poetry collection explores the possibilities of poetic life writing and storytelling. Through interlinked prose poetry sequences, the book traces the formative impressions of a childhood and teenage years spent in the US encountering its language and customs through the performative procedures of poetry. The book explores two key research questions: 1) What are the affordances of situating poetic life writing as feminist practice; how can poetic life-writing create space for theorising the personal as political, aesthetic, and linguistic, and contribute to the expression of female-identified experiences? 2) In what ways can the performance of poetry address, and convey, the ways in which linguistic experiences shape subjectivity?The research process during the writing of the book (2021 – 2025) included exploring foundational poetic texts of experimental feminist life writing to contextualise my creative life writing, including Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal and Lynne Hejinian’s My Life, and attending and performing at multidisciplinary symposia of poetry, music, and performance art. The research towards the book was disseminated through poetry performances at international poetry festivals, invited readings at art galleries; through a programme on NTS Radio; and in the book chapter I authored which discusses a sequence of poems in the collection (entitled ‘Wieners’) ‘Experimental Poetic Autography: Writing the Languaged Self’ in Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process, eds. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2026).An outcome of my research was furthering theoretical knowledge about the relationship between life writing and feminist theory; in framing poetic life writing as ‘autography’, auto-fictional and auto-theoretical methodologies can be fruitfully applied to expand the ways in which female-identified experiences are explored and written about. Another outcome arising from the research process were new methods of performing poetry, including muti-disciplinary approaches including sound and visual media.