Hand Over Mouth Music (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781786942142)

Janette Ayachi's dazzling first collection moves between remembered and imagined spaces as she celebrates the world's variousness, and the energies and exhaustions of the body. Revelling in the many voices she might find for herself, Ayachi locates herself in both her Algerian and Scottish roots, her relationships with her family and lovers, her own motherhood, and an equally joyful but more precarious exploration of desire. More than anything, this book is a celebration of all Ayachi loves and has loved, especially her own daughters. It is a book that makes a space for itself in the disruptive pleasures of writing, in the face of all that might stifle her, alive to all the potentials of laughter and silence as well as song.


Author: Janette Ayachi
ISBN-10: 1786942143
ISBN-13: 9781786942142
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/01/2019
Pages: 64
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.25lbs
Size: 7.20h x 4.40w x 0.30d

About the Author

Janette Ayachi (1982- ) is a Scottish-Algerian poet who has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies from presses such as Polygon; Seren, and 'The Best British Poetry of 2015'. With a BA combined-honours degree in English Literature and Film & Media from Stirling University, she then graduated with an MSc in Creative Writing from Edinburgh University.

She collaborates with artists; her film poems have been screened at festivals, and she won The Commonword Barbara Burford Prize for Young Writers in 2014. In 2015 she was Digital Poet in Residence with The Poetry School, and after performing her poem about Amy Winehouse on BBC Radio Scotland in 2016, she returned as an Arts & culture critic for a year on the Janice Forsyth Culture Show. The following year she was commissioned to write a poem for a BBC Radio 4 documentary 'Conversations on a Bench'.

She is the author of poetry pamphlets Pauses at Zebra Crossings and A Choir of Ghosts and a children's chapter book The Mermaid, The Girl and The Gondola, illustrated by Fabio Perla. She is currently working on Lonerlust a nonfiction narrative about travelling alone. This is her first full poetry collection.