About the Poet

Teo Eve’s writing explores writing, querying language’s ability to adequately negotiate the complexities of our modern world. Teo’s debut poetry collection The Ox House, which deconstructs the alphabet to ask how it can be re-
constructed, was released by Penteract Press in 2022; its spiritual sequel, I Imagine an Image, is forthcoming from Penteract in 2024. As editor of Silly Goose Press, Teo edited and released Writing Notts 2021: An Anthology of Nottinghamshire Poetry, which was freely distributed throughout Nottingham: a city the author loves for its rebellion, & refusal to accept the world as it is.

Preview

Introduction 一 On On Shaving

The author is dead. So the story goes.

But perhaps it is no surprise that in this age of constant digital documentation; of easy access to an author’s actual(!?!) thoughts and feelings via a proliferation of Tweets, interviews, opinions shared; of constant and necessary discussions about the (in)ability to separate art from artist, the author has resurrected themself, learned to speak for the fiction that is the life they use their body for, rather than simply in the abstracted and authorial voice of literature.

Autofiction is a vital genre that allows individuals to rage against the bars that society has placed around them, to investigate anecdotally the prejudices of the world. If fiction is a window to other souls, other lived experiences, other points of view, autofiction is a bust-open wall: a view into the house’s entirety, rather than a stolen glimpse of furniture through smudged glass.

Words of Praise

“Eve’s treatise On Shaving offers a gender/genre-bending account of the ways in which growing/removing hair is a performative action that no more denotes gender than the shoes one wears. With a mix of anecdotes, literary references and astute political commentary, Eve has created a fascinating and thought-provoking work that needs to be read by anyone interested in gender. Entertaining and enlightening auto-fiction.”

 – JP Seabright, writer & co-writer of Fragments Before the Fall & GenderFux

“Part essay, part memoir, part experimental poetry (and yet altogether none of these things), Eve ruminates on how the way we choose to present to the world can be an acceptance, a rebellion, both, and neither.  ‘I define myself’, Eve writes, and in this simple statement there is both the power of a raging storm and the calm of a clear blue sky. Reading this book is to understand duality and absence, and for a short while to experience the weighty weightlessness of being.”- Arden Hunter, author of Pull Yourself Together and Drifting Bottles