Shortlisted for the 2012 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. '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 poeti' -Fiona Sampson, Guardian. '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.
