Fanny B. Mine by Nikki Dudley. Reviews and description below.
Also by the author with BBP – I’d Better Let You Go.
About The Author
Nikki Dudley is managing editor of streetcake magazine and also runs the streetcake writing prize and MumWrite. She has a chapbook and collection with KFS. She is the winner of the Virginia Prize 2020 and her second novel, Volta was published in May 2021. Beir Bua Press collections: I’d Better Let Your Go, published July 2021.
Website: www.NikkiDudleyWriter.com Twitter: @NikkiDudley20
Introduction to Fanny B. Mine
Keats
My secondary school was right beside Hampstead Heath in North London. When my English teacher started teaching us about Keats, I would stare out the window and imagine him wandering around the Heath writing poems. It made me feel reassured by who I wanted to be – a poet, a thinker, someone who loved words. It made me feel more normal in this state school in the middle of London, where in sixth form, people would laugh at me in English when I answered questions!
I found a lot of comfort in Keat’s words, especially his neuroses and his fears, the fact that he wasn’t sure about his own abilities, as well as his love for nature and his talent for turning ideas on their heads with his uncertainty. What also struck me when reading his letters though was his jealousy concerning his love, Fanny Brawne. His lack of confidence sometimes made him mean in his letters. I sometimes wondered what would have happened if they had met in modern times – whether Fanny would have grown tired of the jealousy. What would have happened if Keats hadn’t died so young? In a later letter, Fanny even mentions that perhaps she ‘overrated’ Keats in her younger life.
This collection is the result of these musings…
PREVIEW
Praise for Fanny B. Mine
“In the tradition of Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden Baden and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, Dudley playfully reimagines a historical passion; here twisting and dragging the collection’s source material through the bulging intestines of modern-day self-making, resulting in a heady cacophony of post-post-classical internetism. “How do I love thee? Let me fragment the ways.”
- Lydia Unsworth; poet,latest collection out with Beir Bua Press, Some Murmur.
“Such a thrilling time to be a reader; this collection takes us ziplining across new terrain, a dead poet, his lover, the male gaze, old fashioned love repurposed for modern times. The original words of love filtered through apps, texts, the internet and Dudley’s unbounded imagination. There is real love here, but not between the main players but from Dudley and her love of the written word and Keats, it is palpable and resonates these experiments to bowed head at prayer time.”
- Michelle Moloney King; poet, visual poet, editor Beir Bua Press.
“Fanny B. Mine is visually, structurally, and linguistically brilliant. I loved every letter of this collection, Nikki has created something truly amazing. At times humorous, and always thought-provoking, Fanny B. Mine is an intriguing exploration into the relationship between Keats and Fanny with a modern twist.”
- Leia Butler; writer and head editor of Full House Literary Magazine.
Also by the author with BBP – I’d Better Let You Go.
Beir Bua Press 