BOOKS
Retablo for a door
Shearsman Books, 2026
A retablo is a painting created in thanks for divine protection or a miracle. In this luminous collection, Michelle Penn transposes the art form into poems that explore aspects of the female experience. Her retablos capture moments of vulnerability, confrontations with politics and societal ideals, the struggle to construct a self, and the search for something to believe in when protection and miracles seem rare. A rich palette of images — from nuclear blast glass and an atomic Madonna to a sword-swallowing Pierrot and a muse-for-hire — creates a compelling picture of endurance, defiance, and ultimately, hope.
'Michelle Penn’s retablos are eloquent and profound curiosities. Like the earliest manifestations of lyric, these poems have a ‘sung’ quality that can be felt within the body. The resulting sound is a howling of ‘pain into mountains of scree’ that ‘hungers to become ephemeral as wind.’ But even as these poem-objects inhabit ancient traditions, they are simultaneously futuristic, political and intimately strange – as though the poet has invented a new medium embracing dance, sculpture, relic-assemblage and oratorio. Such originality is rare.'
Kathryn Maris, author of The House with Only an Attic and a Basement
These are votive offerings, testings of words, laced with blood and lit with devastating intensity. I found them very powerful.
Chrissy Williams, Editor, PERVERSE
Order from Shearsman.
Read a review from Jennifer Lee Tsai in The Guardian.
BOOKS
Paper Crusade
Arachne Press, 2022
A book-length poem re-imagining The Tempest as a tragedy.
'A visionary, intertextual journey that takes us far beyond standard retelling or response
to Shakespeare. Penn brings new life to the characters here, with an incantatory power
that threatens to lose us in the words and the waves but always takes us somewhere
captivating and unexpected.'
Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets
'There must be something of Prospero in @mich_penn, because #PaperCrusade
is utterly mesmeric & captivating.'
Jade Marshall, Shout About Books, Instagram
'Penn's poems draw on and move beyond the intertextual reverberations of Shakespeare's
play to unfold themselves in voices that are both archetypal and unpredictable...Through
imaginative experiments in form and punctuation, space and silence, line and stanza break...
Penn skilfully reframes the drama, the questions, the voices and their authority.
Lesley Sharpe, review, Alchemy Spoon
Paper Crusade was itself reimagined as a theatre piece, 'Storm Child.' It was a collaboration
with Théatre Volière as part of the Poetry Plays festival at The Cockpit Theatre, London, 18-20 April, 2024.
Self-portrait as a diviner, failing
Winner, 2018 Paper Swans Prize
Paper Swans Press, 2018
'Self-portrait as a diviner, failing has real finesse. ... This is an incredibly moving
read, rhythmical, each poem almost moans from the page'
Abegail Morley, Judge, 2018 Paper Swans Prize
'Distinctively voiced and formally inventive'
Jeffery Sugarman, Poetry Wales