HOW TO EXTRICATE YOURSELF by Laura Theis
WINNER OF THE BRIAN DEMPSEY MEMORIAL PRIZE 2020 and nominated for the Elgin Award 2021 (Science Fiction Poetry Association)
WINNER OF THE BRIAN DEMPSEY MEMORIAL PRIZE 2020 and nominated for the Elgin Award 2021 (Science Fiction Poetry Association)
Laura Theis grew up in Germany, moved to the UK a decade ago, and writes poems, stories and songs in her second language. She has an MSt (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Keble College, Oxford. Her work has been published in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Canada and the U.S.
An AM Heath Prize recipient, she has also won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize, the Hammond House International Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2020 Mogford Short Story Prize. She was runner-up for the Mslexia Flash Fiction Prize and a finalist in over twenty other international poetry and fiction competitions. Lauar Theis's debut collection, 'how to extricate yourself', contains poems from Laura's winning entry to Dempsey & Windle's Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition 2020. Many of the poems in this pamphlet come from asking ‘what if…’, escaping into one’s imagination, into the realm of the fantastical. What would it be like to be a writer in residence on the moon? Or to wake up with hair made out of spiders? To move in with a dragon? Or accidentally raise a demon baby? The poems’ speakers and narrative voices try to make sense of their narrowing world and extricate themselves through pretending, self-deception and make-believe; spells and incarnations; disappearing and becoming somebody new.
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