Permit Me to Write My Own Ending - Rebecca Faulkner
Permit Me To Write My Own Ending is a collection that spans generations and timescapes - from gritty explorations of a London adolescence, to haunting poems detailing love and adulthood in the US. Faulkner’s language and form dissects the emotional impact of historical trauma, navigating and sharply reframing nationality and memory, interiority and history. Depictions of London during the Blitz and post-war Berlin sit alongside poems about motherhood and childhood from the perspective of one of Freud’s most famous patients. In this defiant debut collection, the act of writing boldly confronts a landscape dominated by patriarchal notions of the female, deftly redefining it with language and vivid imagery. Faulkner unapologetically writes her own ending.
Praise for Permit Me to Write My Own Ending
"In Rebecca Faulkner’s blazing debut collection, women and girls fight to pull themselves from the wreckage when society’s contradictory expectations collide. Girlhood is “long-legged / & low-cut with the hustle of becoming,” while “women who endure” wrestle with the terrors and errors of motherhood. This is a book laced liberally—and strangely beautifully— with violence, both personal and impersonal, both large and small. In poems about family and wartime and love, the language of combat is laid down like landmines, in innocuous-seeming phrases and surprising places. Men skulk through these pages, lurking in the underbrush of everyday life, the “streets thick with their leering,” their menace viscous. Faulkner is a poet’s poet, an inventive and deft wielder of language, a maker of music. In Permit Me to Write My Own Ending, she sets sound shimmering like stones skipped across water and unfurls multiple meanings from line after line, like bright sails that catch the wind and move us forward." - Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain
"Nothing about Faulkner's poetry is performative. Her work is genuine, honest and unflinching and her speakers find beauty in the most horrific and gruesome aspects of humankind. This collection is a powerful reminder of the futility and fragility of our collective existence. I am confident it will be talked about for many years to come." - Zac Furlough, Founder, Passengers Press"Faulkner’s hunger for things just out of reach transmutes memory with language wrought so precise that colour, objects and people suspend in time, ready for inspection. Permissions sought are
rhetorical - endings in fact, bold new beginnings, in this powerful debut collection." - Pamela Crowe, author of The Bell Tower"Permit me to Write My Own Ending reveals Faulkner's visceral dissection of patriarchy and a jewel-cutting tenacity to resurrect the female body from a national autopsy. Her fierce, taut verse slices the fading map of war for our tongues and our ears, and with agency, she demands we not turn our heads from the perpetual bloodshed of girlhood." - Dr. Sarah Jefferis, author of What Enters the Mouth