Smoothie

Smoothie is Claudine Toutoungi's debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes - often enough to fend off despair - fulfilled. Smoothie plots the wayward wanderings of a beguiling cast of misfits - hotel eavesdroppers, city interlopers, lone wolves, phantom bird-watchers, disaffected language robots and triumphant piano-swallowers - as they try to express themselves. The poems are candid without being confessional: the poet's 'I' encompasses the reader. Language's smooth surface bubbles up as Toutoungi's characters reveal their peculiarly twenty-first-century disorientations, riffing off loneliness, authenticity and heartbreak as they go.

Claudine Toutoungi grew up in Warwickshire and studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford University. After a Master's at Goldsmiths, she trained as an actor at LAMDA and worked as a BBC Radio Drama producer and English teacher. As a dramatist, her plays Bit Part and Slipping have been produced by The Stephen Joseph Theatre. She adapted Slipping for BBC Radio 4, after it was featured in a international reading series at New York's Lark Play Development Centre. Other work for BBC Radio includes Deliverers and Home Front. She lives in Cambridge.