Description

Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals – both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF.

Please, Do Not Touch This Exhibit is Jen Campbell’s second collection, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first book-length collection, The Girl Aquarium (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the poetry category of the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards 2019 and was a semifinalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 (Best Poetry category).

Publisher Review

These are poems which land the reader in the middle of a fantastical ocean and float them to shore on the precision and inventiveness of their imagery; these are poems that create their own mythspaces on the unstable edges of disability and chronic illness, poems which conjure new ways of articulating things about the experience of living in a body which might usually feel beyond language. -- Andrew McMillan Jen Campbell's astounding second collection draws us into a world of mythology, sea monsters and metamorphosis. These are hauntingly beautiful poems that catalogue transformation in all of its horror and joy, strangeness and tenderness. Reading these poems is like being yanked off your feet by hidden currents. This book will burrow under your skin and stay there. -- Cynthia Miller The poems are bold and assured. A delicate balance of wonder, playfulness and horrific revelation. -- Michel Faber This blistering poetry collection explores showmanship, the so-called freak industry, fairytales and spectacle - and, in fact, it doesn't so much unpick these things as smash them to pieces and make them new... I love so much about it: how it kicks against tropes of disfigurement, how science jostles against fantastical circus, how it explores the way in which girls' bodies can be sites of both self-discovery and exploitation. It is defiant, bold, brilliant. As the penultimate poem states, 'Smash this circus to the ground'. -- Elizabeth Macneal * The Guardian *