Be Feared

Jane Burn’s new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood and love, encountering everything from the Snow Queen and the morning song of chainsaws to myths, monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, moving from ‘beware!’ and ‘bereft’ towards a becoming – a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms. Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn’s poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy tale and folklore, invoke a divine carnival of sexuality and wild nature, and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.