"bird of winter reminds us that the root of courage, etymological and otherwise, is heart. Prepare, Dear Reader, to feel." - Nuar Alsadir
Alice Hiller’s debut performs an act of extraordinary witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.
Alice Hiller’s debut performs an act of extraordinary witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.
Alice Hiller is a writer from London and Dieppe. She is the author of The T-Shirt Book (Ebury Press), and holds a PhD from UCL. She was the founding Reviews Editor of Harana Poetry and interviews poets in depth about ‘saying the difficult thing’ on her blog. Hiller was a Jerwood Arvon Poetry Mentee and shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Poetry Fellowship in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Poetry London, Stand, The Cambridge Literary Review, Magma, tentacular, one hand clapping and perverse. Hiller also runs a free poetry workshop aimed at supporting poets working with ‘less welcome’ materials.
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