Cumshot in D Minor
Melissa Lee-Houghton
August 2017
£5
Short Royal stapled
978-0-9932313-4-6
'A wry, unflinching and knowing voice that collects the pieces of the torn-up world and brings them together in such a way that something is assuaged.'
Mark Waldron
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Cumshot in D Minor is the debut title from Offord Road Books, by the Somerset Maugham Award-winning poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. In this pamphlet Lee-Houghton revisits the perils of sexuality, threat and persistence that have made her not only one of the most-read of the Next Generation Poets, but also one of the most controversial and gripping poets of our time. In Cumshot in D Minor the barest facts of sex and aggression are examined in Lee-Houghton’s typically fierce style, but she also enacts a dry and sly wit in these considerations, prompting laughter in the dark as well as fear. These intimate, brilliantly hard pieces reward rereading, and mark a confronting next step in the career of one of our most fearless poets.
Praise for Melissa Lee-Houghton:
‘I feel I need to take a deep breath before trying to describe Melissa Lee-Houghton. The poems in Sunshine, written after two and a half years in psychiatric hospitals, out-Plath Sylvia – they are harrowing, raw and so charged with pain that at the end of each poem, literary comment seems beside the point.’
Kate Kellaway, Best Poetry Books of 2016, Guardian
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‘These unflinching poems feel as if they wrote themselves . . . at times the language becomes rhapsodic, though there is always a lyrical grace and adroitness, and an intense but careful control’.
Pascale Petit
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‘Simply astonishing . . . it overflows with expansive, intense and troubling poems that leave a lasting impression.’
Andrew Parkes, The Poetry School
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‘Melissa Lee-Houghton holds a mirror to our mouths and teaches us how to breathe so that it hurts like hell.’
Abegail Morley
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‘Beautiful Girls is not a book for the faint-hearted: it will survive as testament to poetry’s force in overcoming.’
Chris McCabe
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‘Distilled and achieved . . . There’s a sense that you’re always teetering right on the edge of something but Melissa pushes you a little bit further than most writers would.’
Helen Mort, Five Books
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‘Stunning . . . Lee-Houghton’s poetic world is the underside of mass culture – the black economies of porn, child abuse, prostitution and drug use, and the hidden economy of institutionalisation . . . Sunshine thrills, and sickens.’
Ailbhe Darcy, The Poetry Review