STEPMOTHER

<i>'Euripides said "better a serpent than a stepmother." For a moment, you like the idea of being a single line, winding around everything you touch. A vine.'</i><br><br>'<b>Brave, graceful and absolutely vital - Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women</b>' SARAH HALL, author of <i>Helm</i><br><br><b>When a new relationship casts poet Helen Mort in the role of stepmother, she embarks on a personal quest for understanding; moving across verse and personal essay, from fairytale to modern blended family.</b><br><br>Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of female experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, <i>STEPMOTHER</i> radiates Mort’s signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth.<br><br>Mort interleaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of <i>upon-a-time</i>, and back, changed, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, <i>STEPMOTHER </i>has much to teach us about female power and the fear it still provokes, our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take.<br><br><b>'I was enchanted by her blend of generous lyric and furious cultural critique. A spell for seeing differently’ </b>CLARE POLLARD, author of THE MODERN FAIRIES