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Description
‘Don’t worry, I’m here in the house where every room has a name, but children’s names are often forgotten.’Uplifting and heart-breaking, this lyrical evocation of a childhood on the edge of society marks the arrival of a vital new voice.MINX reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family: a world of grandfathers brewing moonshine in marrows, basement reggae parties, and a mother struggling to support her two daughters on the proceeds of her shadowy profession. Their powerful bond helps the sisters survive when they’re taken into care, in a children’s home that forcibly separates them.With a verve and playfulness that belies their pain, these poems explore what it means to belong. Through daring experiments with form and narrative, MINX captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.
Additional information
| Weight | 0.3 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 2 × 13.5 × 21.6 cm |
| Format | Paperback |
| language1 | |
| Pages | 80 |
| Publisher | |
| Year Published | 2025-3-20 |
| Imprint | |
| Publication City/Country | London, United Kingdom |
| ISBN 10 | 1784745871 |
| About The Author | Karen Downs-Barton is an Anglo-Romani writer who, after a peripatetic childhood including times in state care, now lives in Wiltshire. Winner of the Cosmo Davenport-Hines prize (2021) and Creative Future silver medallist (2022) she holds a PhD from King’s College London, exploring identity through minority languages and multilingualism in entertainment industries. Her pamphlet Didicoy was published by the Poetry Business in 2023 and selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice that year. |
| Review Quote | 'Minx by Karen Downs-Barton is a work of linguistic and formal daring, a poetry collection that inhabits the liminal spaces of identity with precision and verve. Through its incisive engagement with the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller experience, the book interrogates cultural hybridity—half one, half the other—as both a fracture and a site of creative possibility. Downs-Barton’s unflinching diction dismantles the structures of racism and cultural erasure while interrogating the complex legacies of belonging and inheritance. 'I practise the language my grandparents spoke,' she writes, reanimating tradition as an act of resistance and renewal. Minx is a vital contribution to contemporary poetics, a text that challenges, witnesses, and transforms with every line' |
| Other text | 'Her poems are fiercely imaginative, formally innovative, and always explore new territory in the most candid and wonderfully unexpected ways' |
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