People Who Like Meatballs by Selima Hill Bloodaxe Books

The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and Forward Poetry Prize

People Who Like Meatballs brings together two contrasting poem sequences about rejection by ‘this brilliant lyricist of human darkness’ (Fiona Sampson). The title-sequence, People Who Like Meatballs, is about a man’s humiliation by a woman. Into my mother’s snow-encrusted lap is about a dysfunctional mother-child relationship. Like all of Selima Hill’s books, both sequences in People Who Like Meatballs chart ‘extreme experience with a dazzling excess’ (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish.

People Who Like Meatballs was shortlisted for both the 2012 Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award, with the Costa judges calling it ‘a wildly funny and irreverent take on modern life’.

‘Selima Hill is an inimitable talent. The mind is fragile and unreliable in her poetry, but is also tenacious and surprising, capable of the most extraordinary responses, always fighting back with language as its survival kit. Life in general might be said to be her subject, the complications, contradictions and consequences of simply existing. Nevertheless, Hill’s writing is eminently readable and approachable, even fun at times, the voice of a person and a poet who will not be quieted and will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones.’ – Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, on behalf of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry Committee

‘Arguably the most distinctive truth teller to emerge in British poetry…Despite her thematic preoccupations, there’s nothing conscientious or worthy about Hill’s work. She is a flamboyant, exuberant writer who seems effortlessly to juggle her outrageous symbolic lexicon…using techniques of juxtaposition, interruption and symbolism to articulate narratives of the unconscious. Those narratives are the matter of universal, and universally recognisable, psychodrama…hers is a poetry of piercing emotional apprehension, lightly worn… So original that it has sometimes scared off critical scrutineers, her work must now, surely, be acknowledged as being of central importance in British poetry – not only for the courage of its subject matter but also for the lucid compression of its poetics’ – Fiona Sampson, Guardian

‘Hill, more than any other English poet, cranks out angry, impotent, abused and richly surreal Britain. And she is very very funny…fresh, fierce and convincing… A mood-swinging voice, talking to itself rather than to the reader, shows how pain and joy transform the material world’ – Claire Crowther, Poetry London.

‘Her adoption of surrealist techniques of shock, bizarre, juxtaposition and defamiliarisation work to subvert conventional notions of self and the feminine… Hill returns repeatedly to fragmented narratives, charting extreme experience with a dazzling excess’ – Deryn Rees-Jones, Modern Women Poets

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