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The Black Spring Press Group

Humbert Summer

Humbert Summer

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By A.K. Blakemore

WINNER OF THE MELITA HUME POETRY PRIZE 2014

The author of the critically-acclaimed best-selling novel from Granta, The Manningtree Witches  (2021)

Humbert Summer is a book about the febrile matter of fantasy in its rawest form – alternately subversive, awkward, romantic and unsettling. Written between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, the poems in A. K. Blakemore’s debut full-length collection navigate the challenging space between adolescence and (abortive) adulthood in a culture quick to dismiss, commodify or fetishise the female body and imagination.

A. K. Blakemore was born in south London in 1991. She was named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2007 and 2008, and has performed at the Secret Garden Part & Latitude festivals. Her work has been published in a number of journals, zines and anthologies, with her first pamphlet released as part of the Nasty Little Press Nasty Little Intros series in 2013. Her latest release is The Manningtree Witches published by Granta in 2021.

"There’s something darkly heroic about this book’s hedonism, its casually – worn gift for unkinness... A.K.’s poems disprove a truism – they don’t care about you, which is why you keep reading them."Sam Riviere


"At times uncomfortably earnest, full of swagger and often gifted with a snarl, A.K. Blakemore’s Humbert Summer is a first collection refreshingly sure of its own register, balanced deftly between the lyric tradition and the contemporary world, ambitious in its poetic range and – all too rare for poetry in the UK – utterly resistant to the parochial." — Ahren Warner

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