Erratics
A wide-ranging collection of poems political and fantastical, leaping from humour to anger with equal passion, and bounding with energy and sassiness whether considering Cathy’s own experience of disability, or a science fiction future for cleaners… of stars. Entitled Erratics for the boulders abandoned by glacial movement, it also captures the drifting sense buried in some extraordinary poems, and Cathy’s understanding of isolation – as she says in the introduction ‘The standing stones look strange, and jar the system, yet are absolutely right too. I was born in the south but I live in the north. I was born into the middle classes but I’m working class by poverty and experience. I know what it’s like to be homeless… and I also know the correct way to address a duchess… I don’t fit in anywhere – except at poetry events, where you can’t know whether the person next to you is a convicted felon, a linguistics professor, or both.’
Cathy Bryant
Cathy Bryant worked as a shoe shop assistant, life model, civil servant and childminder (among other jobs) before writing professionally. Described as ‘Carol Ann Duffy meets Spike Milligan’, she has won 27 literary awards, including the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize and the Wergle Flomp Award for Humorous Poetry. Cathy’s work has been published all over the world in such publications as Magma, The Andromeda Spaceways, Inflight Magazine, and Stairs and Whispers. She co-edited the anthologies Best of Manchester Poets vols. 1, 2 and 3, and Cathy’s own books are ‘Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature’, ‘Look at All the Women’, ‘How to Win Writing Competitions’ and her latest, ‘Erratics’. Cathy is disabled and bisexual and lives in Cadishead, UK. She also runs the Comps and Calls listings site of free opportunities for impoverished writers atwww.compsandcalls.com/wp