Inspired by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, this vivid collection touches on relevant details from the artist’s colorful life using poetry as its medium. Named after Kahlo’s works, the poems examine a range of topics, including Kahlo’s childhood polio, near-fatal bus accident, tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera, love affairs, miscarriages, and adventures in Mexico City, New York City, and Paris. Transformative and cathartic, this remarkable compilation mirrors Kahlo’s own intense involvement with her paintings and celebrates her accomplishments.
Pascale Petit's latest book is T S Eliot shortlisted What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010, UK edition; Black Lawrence Press, 2011, US edition), also shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. "Pascale's poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life." - Jackie Kay The Observer, Book of the Year. "This arresting collection... exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint" - Ruth Padel, The Guardian. "Pascale Petit creates forms and strategies that go beyond common knowledge of what a poem can or should do; her poetry never behaves itself or betrays itself; and contemporary British poetry is all the livelier for it. What the Water Gave Me is a triumph of creativity and criticism, of persona and impersonation, of personality and impersonality." David Morley
Petit has published five poetry collections including three shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and books of the year in The Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and Observer. She trained as an artist at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected her as one of the Next Generation Poets.
Find out more about her on her website http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk and blog http://www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com
Author photo credit Jemimah Kuhfeld
