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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION*

‘A raw, tender, potent collection’ – JESSICA ANDREWS

‘Gorgeous poems – profound, exploratory, wild, playful – and completely now’ – RUTH PADEL
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The brilliant new collection from T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Award shortlisted poet Helen Mort

Let me kneel
before the sky and let me be humble, untidy,
let me be decorated.

Here are women’s bodies. Hungry adolescent bodies, fluctuating pregnant bodies, ailing aging bodies. Here are bodies as products to be digitized and consumed. Here is the body in nature, changing and growing stronger. Here are tattooed women through history, ink unfurling across their skin.

The Illustrated Woman is a tender and incisive collection about what it means to live in a female body – from the joys and struggles of new motherhood to the trauma of deepfakes. Amidst the landscapes of the Peak District and the glaciers of Greenland, Helen Mort’s remarkable poems transfix the reader in a celebration of beauty and resilience.

‘These are poems that will leave their indelible mark’ – ANDREW MCMILLAN

Publisher Review

The Illustrated Woman bristles with colour and truth. Helen Mort renders the body in desire, shame, love and pain across landscapes to create a dazzling portrait of our own skin as something that belongs only to us -- Jessica Andrews, author of SALTWATER Helen Mort's expert control of the line offers us footpaths through the landscape of the body, showing us all the ways we might mark, redeem, protect or fear for both our own and the bodies of others. -- Andrew McMillan, author of PHYSICAL A triumphal collection, that closes with a ritual cleansing and celebration of the naked body, as it should be celebrated... They can be challenging, unsettling poems for a man to read, but that's what makes them such essential reading - these are poems designed to get under your skin, where they belong -- John Glenday, author of THE GOLDEN MEAN