Making the Wedding Dress
Will be published approx. on 14. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-78463-384-4 (ISBN)
Description
Wills gives readers the exceptional at the heart of daily life, invites us to suspend disbelief, enable the surreal.
She begins Making the Wedding Dress with a quote from a handbook on sewing and asks what can be fixed, what does it mean to make a daughter's wedding dress. The collection fans out to explore bullying, money, trade, rats and sinkholes. A third section questions how humans relate to other species, speculates on a worm's opinion of people, the communal life of starlings. The book ends on ideas of exits and entrances, home, absences within a family and the fragility of care.
Making the Wedding Dress makes many unexpected connections, moving from sauna to plum tree, to a luxury yacht cruising off Brighton beach. It asks what crows think of humans, it urges its readers to question what is normal.
Jackie Wills' six previous collections have taken on big issues but her poems are always grounded. Her poems have been described as warm and witty, satirical, feminist and unputdownable. She starts with the mundane, then exaggerates - a list of the many words used to describe a woman, a sequence of short, impressionist poems on the surreality of menopause.
Liz Lochhead described her 1995 debut, Powder Tower (Arc 1995), as "full of fabulous and exact fictions about ordinary family life". Writer Robert Macfarlane described her second book Party (Leviathan 2000) as "a very fine collection indeed".
She begins Making the Wedding Dress with a quote from a handbook on sewing and asks what can be fixed, what does it mean to make a daughter's wedding dress. The collection fans out to explore bullying, money, trade, rats and sinkholes. A third section questions how humans relate to other species, speculates on a worm's opinion of people, the communal life of starlings. The book ends on ideas of exits and entrances, home, absences within a family and the fragility of care.
Making the Wedding Dress makes many unexpected connections, moving from sauna to plum tree, to a luxury yacht cruising off Brighton beach. It asks what crows think of humans, it urges its readers to question what is normal.
Jackie Wills' six previous collections have taken on big issues but her poems are always grounded. Her poems have been described as warm and witty, satirical, feminist and unputdownable. She starts with the mundane, then exaggerates - a list of the many words used to describe a woman, a sequence of short, impressionist poems on the surreality of menopause.
Liz Lochhead described her 1995 debut, Powder Tower (Arc 1995), as "full of fabulous and exact fictions about ordinary family life". Writer Robert Macfarlane described her second book Party (Leviathan 2000) as "a very fine collection indeed".
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Illustrations
Not illustrated
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 130 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
82 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78463-384-4 (9781784633844)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
The first of Jackie Wills' six collections of poetry was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot award. Former journalist and tutor, her recent publications are On Poetry: Reading, Writing and Working with Poems (Smith Doorstop, 2023) and A Friable Earth (Arc 2019). In 2023 she won a Cholmondely Award. Judge Moniza Alvi wrote: "Jackie Wills is a very natural, genuine poet of sensitivity, boldness and flair. She has been writing explorative, compassionate and often mesmerising poetry for many years."