{"product_id":"howtolive","title":"How to Live","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘Women who speak have always been monstrous. That twisty sphinx, those tempting sirens; better plug your ears with wax, boys.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhere are the female philosophers? Why are women silenced? Who can tell us how to live? In her fourth collection of poetry, Helen Rickerby takes readers on a journey into women’s writing, a quest for philosophical answers, and an investigation of poetic form.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe poems in How to Live engage in a conversation with ‘the unsilent women’ – Hipparchia and George Eliot, Ban Zhao and Mary Shelley. They do so in order to explore philosophical and practical questions: how one could or should live a good life, how to be happy, how to not die, how to live. Rickerby thinks through the ways that poetry can build up and deconstruct a life, how the subtext and layers inherent in poetry can add to the telling of a life story, and how different perspectives can be incorporated into one work – the place where poetry meets essay, where fiction meets non-fiction, where biography meets autobiography, where plain-speaking meets lyricism, where form pushes against digression.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe work is witty (‘Perhaps I should ban “perhaps”.’) and self-reflexive (‘Am I afraid that if I let the words leak out, they’ll mix with oxygen and become prose?’) as Rickerby draws on the intensity, symbolism and layering of poetic form, using poetry as a space of exploration of ideas, of thinking, of essaying.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Auckland University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31527925809186,"sku":"9781869409050","price":24.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0052\/0785\/1042\/products\/c898180b3676021c8f2f6311dc5021da3ed491c2.png?v=1584152030","url":"https:\/\/petronella.pro\/products\/howtolive","provider":"Petronella's Gallery and Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}