Search Loading suggestions...

Who Is Mary Sue?

UK Publisher: Faber & Faber

WINNER OF THE MICHAEL MURPHY MEMORIAL PRIZE

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE

In the language of fan fiction, a ‘Mary Sue’ is an idealised and implausibly flawless character: a female archetype that can infuriate audiences for its perceived narcissism.

Such is the setting for this brilliant and important debut by Sophie Collins. In a series of verse and prose collages, Who Is Mary Sue? exposes the presumptive politics behind writing and readership: the idea that men invent while women reflect; that a man writes of the world outside while a woman will turn to the interior.

Part poetry and part reportage, at once playful and sincere, these fictive-factive miniatures deploy original writing and extant quotation in a mode of pure invention. In so doing, they lift up and lay down a revealing sequence of masks and mirrors that disturb the reflection of authority.

A work of captivation and correction, this is a book that will resonate with anyone concerned with identity, shame, gender, trauma, composition and culture: everyone, in other words, who wishes to live openly and think fearlessly in the modern world.

Who Is Mary Sue? is a work for our times and a question for our age: it is a handbook for all those willing to reimagine prescriptive notions of identity and selfhood.

REVIEWS

‘An urgent interrogation of the cultural conditions that continue to suppress women’s voices . a much-needed work of stunning feminist complaint.’ — Alexa Wink ― Poetry Review

Who Is Mary Sue? is a startlingly original text that requests a different mode of reading, one that encourages avoiding labels and easy conclusions. Readers will emerge more interrogative, more invested in the stakes of sexist, limited criticism, after finishing this corrective and captivating debut. — Jade Cuttle ― Guardian

The most original debut of 2018 was Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue?, a unique work of feminist imagining that moves between verse and prose. At its heart is The Engine, a dream-like narrative of shame and disgust, told with disturbing coolness: “I woke with cold lips and nose, and the desire to bite down on raw clay.” — Jeremy Noel-Tod ― Sunday Times, Poetry Books of the Year

Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? is alert to how female authors and their protagonists are often conflated in fiction. Enlisting quotations from Rachel Cusk, Jamaica Kincaid, Sharon Olds and others, Collins builds a defence of women’s imagination. She mixes lyric and prose forms to meditate on the nature of shame, desire and the strangeness of embodiment. — Sandeep Parmar ― Guardian BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The most original debut of 2018 was Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue?, a unique work of feminist imagining that moves between verse and prose. At its heart is The Engine, a dream-like narrative of shame and disgust, told with disturbing coolness: ‘I woke with cold lips and nose, and the desire to bite down on raw clay.’ — Jeremy Noel-Tod ― Sunday Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR

‘I was lucky enough to hear Sophie Collins read from her poetry collection, Who Is Mary Sue? and it remained with me.’ — Nicole Flattery ― Irish Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR

For all its many forms and fragments – collage, dramatic monologue, short poem, long poem, prose poem, notebook entry, and reading diary – this is a collection with a repeated and urgent theme: our frustrated and frustrating desire to read lyric poetry, particularly lyric poetry by women, biographically. It has links formally to Marianne Moore and philosophically to Denise Riley while at the same time sounding completely new and strange. Boldly experimental, it is also quiet and understated, unsettling us as much by its silence as its accumulation of voices and textual fragments. Sometimes oblique but always challenging, this book is prepared to take risks, to be both playful and disturbing at the same time. ― Judges of the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Glasgow. She is the author of Who Is...