Votive Mess
Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, tracing Welsh poet Nia Davies' efforts to a lost mother tongue, y iaith Gymraeg, and embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel.. The navel of the dream is inside out.
Nia Davies' second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. Nia Davies' first full-length collection, All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. She was editor of Poetry Wales from 2014 to 2019, and has worked on several international and collaborative projects such as Literature Across Frontiers, Wales International Poetry Festival and Wales Literature Exchange. Her pamphlets, Then Spree (Salt, 2012), Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Boiled String, 2016) and England (Crater, 2017), were followed by her first book-length collection, All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Her second full-length collection Votive Mess is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. She was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford.
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