Missel-Child

According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a 'missel-child' is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree - a changeling, perhaps, whereof many strange things are conceived. Helen Tookey's first full collection of poems starts from the missel-child to explore archaeologies of identity, place and language. She is a formally inventive writer, using collage and syllabics, exploring elegy and myth. The poems in this book create a space in which language enables something to be said and also to be shown.

Helen Tookey lives in Liverpool, where she teaches creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Missel-Child, was published by Carcanet in 2014; her other publications include Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity (Oxford University Press) and, co-edited with Bryan Biggs, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (Liverpool University Press).