Released 31st May, 2024 // 110 pages // 978-1-916938-20-5 // RRP £11.99
JLM Morton’s Red Handed, is a remarkably original and impressive debut collection of poetry exploring the histories of cloth and dye, the natural world, and family. Morton skilfully combines personal recollections with political activism and care, her voice raw and her imagination fierce. These poems are exquisitely crafted, with a sensory language of colours and textures, Red Handed is vibrant and alive.
PRAISE for Red Handed:
JLM Morton has created a visceral and profound testament to rural life and the cloth and dye industries of her locale, where the injustice of global colonial power is as intrinsic to those industries as the gorgeous linguistic weave of her lines. These poems are full blooded and vibrant as the cochineal beetles of Stroud Scarlet, as numinous and earthy as a rock of indigo blue gold. Red Handed is a revelatory, raw, and deeply imaginative evocation of rural working-class heritage.
— Pascale Petit
A stunning debut collection of poems that run like rivers and stones through each other. The reader marvels at how Morton's poems fold, weave, duck, buckle and dovetail. A lost England, ancient nature, women and social justice are her themes. We are plunged backwards and forwards into worlds. This book is a puzzle, a song and a collection of poems which feel relevant to our collective need for healing from the earth.
— Monique Roffey
Is this what we call beauty?' asks the opening poem in Red Handed. Yes: JLM Morton's collection shows us beauty in all its frightening, fascinating complexity. These are poems that look for trouble, under the skin of earth, show us our own predicament. They are historically aware, political, environmentally conscious pieces of art. They're also fantastically readable lyric poems. Enjoy them, be changed by them.
— Helen Mort
Red Handed deals in place – places that are mutable, evasive, subject to a history that is anything but linear. Just scrape the surface, they dare you – lift this up, look closer. And what you find there is a poetry that is strange and original, evocative and assured.
— Martha Sprackland
JLM Morton’s dazzling debut Red Handed dares speak the ‘unspeakable’ truth as a ‘moth wants the light’. There is an active embodiment here, of place in the lyric, of theme in the form. The white spaces, ellipses and black-outs speak to the silencing of the erased and exploited workers of the indigo cloth trade while foregrounding their labour and suffering with searing empathy. Hands bleeding dye, ‘waves/ of bioluminescence/ carrying iron chains’, here is a voice that delves deep into the natural world and history to lament and celebrate, and ultimately to honour ‘bodies that remember such histories even as we forget them.’
— Vasiliki Albedo
Poems which are beautiful and powerful, varied and vigorous and which slide seamlessly between the intimate and epic. They come together to act as a hymn to the Stroud Valleys, celebrating a place which is raw, beautiful and haunted by restless ghosts - both welcome and troubling.
— Alice Jolly
ABOUT JLM Morton:
JLM Morton is a writer and poet based in Gloucestershire, England. Winner of the Laurie Lee and Geoffrey Dearmer prizes, her poems appear in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma, Living With Water (MUP, 2023), and elsewhere. Morton’s work explores rural experience and belonging, ancestry, place and practices of care, repair and solidarity across human and other-than-human worlds. Red Handed is her first poetry collection.
