The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate

The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate by the inaugural BBC Scotland Poet-In-Residence Rachel McCrum is both lyrical and gentle demanding and fierce as it carves its own path through themes of family place environment and repression. The poems in the collection are fragments of McCrums sea-bourne journey from Northern Island across Scotland and alighting in Canada. Its a collection about leaving home and what you take with you.About Rachel McCrumRachel McCrum was born in 1982 and grew up in Donaghadee Northern Ireland. She lived in Edinburgh Scotland from 2010 to 2016 where she previously published two pamphlets with Stewed Rhubarb Press: The Glassblower Dances (2012 winner of the Callum MacDonald Award) and Do Not Alight Here Again (2015 also a solo Fringe show). She was the Broad of cult spoken word cabaret Rally & Broad the inaugural BBC Scotland Poet-In-Residence and a recipient of an RLS Fellowship in 2016. She has performed and taught across the UK Ireland Greece South Africa Haiti and Canada. She currently lives in Montreal Quebec where she is Director of Les Cabarets Batards.ReviewsFrancesca Beard: [These voices] come in banging doors from the street and the public house and the rented room above the library with a blast of salt air and the smell of malt and red-knuckled ideas that say Lets dance and theres so much oxygen in them to breathe them in is rich for the blood.Stuart Kelly The Scotsman: There is a great deal of won humour and wonder here. [...] The whole collection manages to take the lyrical and whittle it into the political. [...] Time and again there are snatches that stick in the memoryAnnie Rutherford The Skinny: [McCrums] poems - irreverent heart-wrenching rallying - have etched themselves into the literary landscape of the country she has now left behind. [...] There are poems of the sea bracing and surprising as spray-slapped salt air [...] humour passion and delightful monstrosityArusa Qureshi The List: Another impassioned addition to her repertoire [...] soulful and yet defiantAlison Craig The Bottle Imp: A voice that sings rages roars as you read. These poems make their own stage. The voice is an extraordinary one: strident angry full of blood and air but then tender lyrical quiet.