STEPMOTHER

Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Helen Mort embarks on a personal quest to understand that most maligned of figures: the stepmother - from the put-upon parent of the blended family, to the wicked queen.

Euripides said "better a serpent than a stepmother." For a moment, you like the idea of being a single line, winding around everything you touch. A vine.

Brave, graceful and absolutely vital - Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women - SARAH HALL, author of Helm

When a new relationship casts poet Helen Mort in the role of stepmother, she embarks on a personal quest for understanding; moving across verse and personal essay, from fairytale to modern blended family.

Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of female experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, Stepmother radiates Mort's signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth.

Mort interleaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, changed, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, Stepmother has much to teach us about female power and the fear it still provokes, our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take.

I was enchanted by her blend of generous lyric and furious cultural critique. A spell for seeing differently - CLARE POLLARD, author of The Modern Fairies