Human Body Is A Hive

A joyful and sensuous addition to the lesbian literary canon. Beautiful. – Joelle Taylor, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for C+nto & Othered Poems

Amidst the joys and complexities of queer family-making, Gillingham offers us tender, sensual and profound poems suffused with a tensile strength.’ – Mary Jean Chan, winner of the Costa Poetry Award for Fléche

Erica Gillingham’s The Human Body is a Hive is a playful & observant reconception of queer love & queer family-making composed in two halves. Opening with a shameless celebration of sex & desire, the collection expands the boundaries of love to include friendship, romance, & lifelong partnership.

The latter catalogues the cyclical heartbreaks & wonders of fertility treatment through the microscopic lenses of nature, medicine, & art. Quietly moving & profoundly celebratory, this exciting debut evokes vulnerability & resilience.

In this arresting poetry pamphlet, the human body is a landscape and a hive; a cosmic object and a rhythm. Whether her feet are in metal stirrups on a hospital bed or pacing the hardwood of a gallery floor, Erica asks—intimately, unexpectedly, and one imagines with a wry smile—what it means to be both alive and in the body, and so also how we love. – Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

The Human Body is a Hive is a flush of warmth to the soul. [...] This debut pamphlet is important reading to anyone who has hopes of being a parent today, whilst evoking a beautiful tale of love, creation and motherhood as old as time. – Jo Flynn, director of For Books’ Sake and author of Swallowing Sands

For fans of The Air Year by Caroline Bird, Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson, and The Adoption Papers by Jackie Kay