The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning

Description

“Innovative, stirring poems … A poet adept at weaving devastating candour with humour and wordplay…”  – Rebecca Goss

The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning is Alison Binney’s eagerly awaited debut collection. The title refers to the act of de-cluttering one’s own life to save loved ones the trouble, a reality far removed from the poet’s own experience of sorting and clearing the family home of a parent with Alzheimer’s. Connection, memory, loss and belonging are recurring themes in poems which explore all the messy sides of life. Writing with heart and tenderness about coming out, coming of age, teaching, nature, grief and recovery, Alison Binney’s poems sing with vitality and humour.

Alison Binney is a poet and English teacher from Cambridge. She has taught in state secondary schools for 28 years, and also teaches on the PGCE English course at the University of Cambridge. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Other Women’s Kitchens, won the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and was published by Seren Books in 2021. Her poems have been widely published, online and in print, in journals such as The North, The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Strix, Spelt, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Gutter, Under the Radar and The Fenland Poetry Journal. Her poems have been Highly Commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry, the Bridport Prize and the Rialto Nature and Place Competition. She founded the Cambridge branch of the National Writing Project, which brings together teachers as writers. A keen hillwalker, she has very slowly acquired a taste for the Fens.