Sapphic & Sweary: Feminist poetry with Jane Goldman *speaker change*

All Book Fringe events are FREE in person + online | no tickets required (but you can reserve them here to get a book/reminder of the event)

please not Jane Aldous is no longer able to attend due to illness, however the brilliant Alice Tarbuck is stepping up for us instead!

Jane Aldous and Jane Goldman are joining us at this year’s Book Fringe for a feminist poetry showcase that promises to be totally captivating (as well as very gay and very sweary)!

Jane Goldman’s latest collection, Catullus 64, offers a "meticulous line by line translation from the Latin into richly textured contemporary English that honours Catullus's powerful experiment in holding to account the politics of epic poetics by the competing politics of his renowned erotic lyricism. Catullus 64 is thus a biting satire on martial imperialism, an indictment of its reliance on the marital institution of compulsory heterosexuality."

Catullus 64 follows on from SEKXPHRASTIKS, described as “a derangement of the senses as well as a sharp intersectional appraisal of encounter, often going beyond the human” by Maria Sledmere in Spam Zine.

Jane Aldous’s 2023 collection More Patina than Gleam celebrates outsiders getting by in hard times – the day to day grind of cleaning a house, periods, prejudice, ageing, sexuality and falling in and out of love.

In the words of Joy Howard: "A novella in seventy sonnets, and a page turner at that – some achievement! Aldous has given us a rare treat. An absorbing narrative of both actual and emotional journeys are given life on the page".

Both are vital feminist voices, weaving thoughts about the human body, the natural environment, and our socio-political surroundings to explosive poetry.

Jane Goldman and Jane Aldous are joining Lighthouse as part of this year’s Book Fringe: ALT Edition in partnership with two other Edinburgh indie bookshops – Argonaut and Typewronger

Read more about Book Fringe here

Our Speakers:

Jane Goldman lives in Edinburgh and is Reader in English at the University of Glasgow. She likes anything a word can do. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, as well as in the weird folds: everyday poems from the Anthropocene, edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020), and in the pamphlet, Border Thoughts (Sufficient Place/Leamington Books, 2014). SEKXPHRASTIKS was her first full length collection.

Jane Aldous lives in Edinburgh where she finds many sources of inspiration for her poems in nature in the garden, allotment and surrounding countryside. Her poems have appeared in Southlight, Northwords Now, poetandgeek have been commended in the Bridport Prize, the Norman MacCaig Centenary Prize, the Baker Prize, Buzzwords and she won the Wigtown Poetry Prize in 2012. Jane’s debut poetry collection Let out the Djinn was published by Arachne Press in 2019 and several of her poems appear in Arachne’s Solstice Shorts Festivals anthologies. More Patina than Gleam is Jane’s second collection, also published by Archane Press. Her poems have also been also been anthologised by Edinburgh Council Museum and Galleries, Speculative Books (also podcast), the Stanza Poetry Map of Scotland (online), New Writing Scotland and Grey Hen Press.