The poems in Platinum Blonde are vulnerable, performative, and ardently female. Stuckes deftly balances violence and wit, self-consciousness and panache. She can turn a sentence on a dime: “This is how I want to die; in a boat, on fire / while Billie Holiday crawls out of a speaker.” And “Having an affair / is just getting all dressed up to cut yourself.” Get yourself a bottle of gin, some photos of your exes, and settle into a velvet chaise longue to read. You’re going to love this book.' - Kim Addonizio

Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset. She has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet. She has performed at the Southbank Centre, Waterstones Trafalgar Square, Wenlock Poetry Festival and she was the Ledbury Poetry Festival young poet in residence in 2015. She has also read her work on BBC Radio 3. Her writing has appeared in The Rialto, The North, Ash and Ambit among others. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic (Smith Doorstop) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award 2017, and she won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019. Her poem ‘Thus I became a heart-eater’ from Platinum Blonde won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2019. Her first full-length collection, Platinum Blonde, was published by Bloodaxe in 2020.