33.9 Million Miles From Lyme Regis

By Laurie Avadis

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“My relationships with my biological and musical family, with lovers and love both lost and lingering, have been passionate and implosive.

I have ghost-hovered through life to the patchwork soundtrack of Waits, Sparks, Queen and Korn, in the company of whales and angels. I have dined in the discarded thorax of an alien insect, climbed the face of a brownstone and stared from the window of a loft apartment in New York as the street below dissolved in to war.

I am plagued by the suburban dilemmas of our time: who is going to take out the rubbish, whose turn is it to change the water in the fish tank, what is beyond the word forever?

When love ended in separation, in a journey to Mars and beyond, I found a voice I had never heard.

I am Laurie Avadis and these are my poems.”

(Longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards 2021.)

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