Kirjahaku

"Ruth Stacey's How to Wear Grunge eschews nostalgia and the self-fulfilling mythology of rock's nearly-famous excesses for a fierce, feminist holler back into the feedback of another place and time, in all its bleached and sticky-carpeted illusions and almost-glory. Between truth or dare narratives that toy with the tension of hard facts - "Too gloomy, tell me about the prettiness again. / No. Tell me the worst thing" - these poems are wild and wise, and faultlessly written. There is a beating rock' n' roll heart of riot-grrl rebellion in every line. Stacey is a fearless and utterly compelling writer, whose candid, courageous poetry takes on the prevailing narrative and places women at the very epicentre." - Jane Commane "In How to Wear Grunge, Ruth Stacey has achieved a bittersweet examination of brutal youth and violent love, with expert attention to the timing of acceptance, obsession and revelation. There's almost a contact-high to these poems, an intoxication that has been carefully crafted to provide relief from the horrors of the past and of each other, creating a deceptively fragile romance of a sub-culture that encouraged the dirt and distortion of the fragmented self. However, once we have questioned the lives of the damaged, haunted souls in this cool as hell collection, what burns through is strength and survival, wounds that gush with the language of dark joy, the sweet stink of dope and incense, a promise (to past, present and future selves) tightly rolled into a joint so full of flavour it will leave your mouth watering. How to Wear Grunge is ultimately a kaleidoscopic questionnaire. There are no right or wrong answers. In the end, we all dance to something. We make noise, we hurt each other and, sometimes, we forgive." - Bobby Parker

In The Dark Room: Letters to Krista, Ruth Stacey and Krista Kay write a collaborative love letter to time and loss, a call and response that echoes through the spaces where our collective understanding of public tragedy collides with the vestiges of personal memory. Juxtaposing Stacey's taut prose with Kay's darkly evocative photographs (many of which document her friendship with tragic grunge-era lovers Layne Staley and Demri Parrott), The Dark Room offers a moving meditation on the relationships between memory, death, and the traces we leave in our wake. - Alissa BennettRuth Stacey writes in The Dark Room, "only a loved one could take these photographs" and that feeling also pervades in her poetic letters and on every turn of the page of this lovely, haunting, and deeply felt book. - Kevin Sampsell

The subject of Ruth Stacey's poetry collection is Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 - 18 September 1951). Pamela Colman Smith was a British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist. She is best-known for illustrating the Rider-Waite tarot deck (also called the Rider-Waite-Smith or Waite-Smith deck) for Arthur Edward Waite. This tarot deck became the standard among tarot card readers, and remains the most widely used today. Smith also illustrated over 20 books, wrote two collections of Jamaican folklore, edited two magazines, and ran the Green Sheaf Press, a small press focused on women writers."These are poems of natural grace and confidence, whose readability and joy comes from a Herculean research endeavour. By turns funny, sad and visionary, with an extraordinary imagistic felicity that meets its subject on equal terms. As a collection it raises the bar of what can be achieved with biographical and docupoetics. Sensational."- Luke Kennard"A remarkable book that captures the unique spirit of Pamela Colman Smith. Ruth Stacey's beautiful poetry collection, Feel Everything , achieves the difficult feat of shedding light into the mind of Pamela Colman Smith, a woman whose life was filled with major gaps and silences. Meticulously researched, Stacey's poems utilise archival and primary source material to create an intertextual narrative that while fictional, feels true. It is an important contribution to the growing body of work on Colman Smith, a multi-talented artist, writer, and publisher whose achievements were largely neglected during her lifetime."- Liz Foley O'Connor"Feel Everything buzzes with the energy of that vanished world, a life in all its joy and despair, with the strange intensity of an artist committed to the singularity of her vision."- Tony Williams"A book of love, magic, loss and the senses, Feel Everything enchants the reader with Stacey's playful and hypnotic language. These are poems to return to again and again."- Katherine Baxter