GIRLING: Eve Esfandiari-Denney and Jack Underwood in conversation

Thursday 17th of September 6.30 (7pm start) to 8.30 Please join us to celebrate the launch of Girling, the debut poetry collection from Eve Esfandiari-Denney. For this event Eve will be in conversation with Jack Underwood. In Girling, Eve Esfandiari-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and what is fated for us in our DNA, culture and environments. Exploring illness and mortality, the narrator asks the reader, ‘I hope it’s ok to die. I can / be something / like actualized metaphor.’ She recounts the story of a father left abandoned in a church, and animates lost fragments of Romani Traveller and Iranian heritage. Grief is portrayed with a tongue in cheek yet cosmic register, as the speaker invests in ‘lions’ mane’, attempts to feel ‘super-radiant’, and moves into ‘moon pose’, while we watch electronic deep-sea claws on YouTube, and google what to do if your mum died last night. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a debut for the contemporary moment, ending on a note that is gorgeously hopeful, as ‘life’ moves towards the speaker, ‘gloriously close’. Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s debut poetry pamphlet, My Bodies This Morning This Evening, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. She has been shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize, Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Granta, BBC Radio 4 and Prototypes Annual Anthology, among others. Girling is her first collection. Jack Underwood is a poet, writer and critic. He is author of Happiness (Faber 2015) Solo for Mascha Voice (Test Centre, 2018) and A Year in the New Life (Faber 2021). His debut work of non-fiction, NOT EVEN THIS, was published by Corsair in 2021. He has collaborated widely with composers and artists, and his work has been published internationally and in translation. He is co-presenter and curator of the Faber Poetry Podcast and is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.