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Kittie Belltree

Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks

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'This poetry will make your heart sink; form lumps in your throat that will be broken by an unexpected snicker at Belltree wit. The collection paints perhaps one of the most haunting yet poignant representations of real life that I have ever experienced in poetry. Belltree is almost cruel in her unpleasant and vicious authenticity, yet this is what makes the poetry so moving. It is uncomfortable, it is intruding, and it is poetry that will undoubtedly change your perception of modern reality.'

– Georgia Fearn, New Welsh Reader

Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks offers the reader poems of finely wrought beauty that contain a hitherto silenced personal history. Belltree joins the tradition of women writers who challenge the parental command and defy the scar upon the tongue in order to speak out with eloquence and exemplary strength of mind.’ 

– Helen May Williams 

‘With dramatic poise and timing, Kittie Belltree’s poems lure the reader to follow her prescient, unflinching gaze as she explores definitions of home and the relationships we have with the people and objects contained by four walls. By turns witty and sophisticated, her writing shivers with a suggestion of unease that is compelling.’

– Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

 

In her debut collection, Kittie Belltree explores fractured connections of self, family and home. At the heart of these poems are a daughter’s fraught relationships with  a mother who grew up in National Socialist Germany and her half-Japanese father, who survived three years as a POW in Czechoslovakia. These dark themes are counterbalanced by moments of comical absurdity and delightful domestic chaos.

 

Kitti Mark Hayes Photographye Belltree was born in south London and lives in Wales. Her poems and short stories have been published in OrbisThe NorthUnder the RadarI am not a silent poetPoetry WalesNew Welsh ReviewThe Lampeter Review and Brittle Star. She has been a Literature Wales Bursary recipient, shortlisted for the Venture Award and highly commended in the Welsh International Poetry Competition, the PENfro Poetry Festival Competition, The Camden and Lumen Poetry Competition and the Orbis Readers Award.