Join us for the launch of In(Habit) by Hetty Cliss!
A raw and moving collection, In(Habit) charts the unraveling of a relationship steeped in coercion and control. Through striking imagery and inventive form, these poems explore the quiet endurance of abuse, the struggle to maintain identity, and the pressure to present a happy façade—threaded through with the rituals of pints, Sunday lunches, and suppressed emotions. Yet, at its core, In(Habit) is a story of resilience, rediscovery, and hope. As the relationship breaks down, the speaker reclaims their power, stepping boldly into a new beginning.
Hetty Cliss is a poet and spoken word artist from the Cambridgeshire Fens and a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA. Her poems can be found in fourteen poems, Propel, Bi+ Lines, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Ware Sonnet Prize 2024. Her debut pamphlet (In)Habit, will be published on 31 March by fourteen poems.
Featuring:
Cia Mangat is a poet from London. Her work has been published in fourteen poems, gal-dem, Propel, and bath magg, and has been broadcast by the BBC. She loves writing about bodies, gossip, and Lady Di, and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming with The Poetry Business in 2025.
Helen Bowell's debut pamphlet The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her poems, reviews and co-translations have been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation and elsewhere. She co-directs Dead [Women] Poets Society, edited the first anthology of bi+ poets, Bi+ Lines (published by fourteen poems, 2023), and produced the Poetry Translation Centre's 20th birthday programme of events in 2024.
Prerana Kumar is an Indian writer and editor based in London. They are currently reading for a funded doctorate in Creative Writing at QMUL. A winner of the 2022 Rebecca Swift Foundation's Women Poets’ Prize, their debut pamphlet, Ixora is out with Guillemot Press. Their work appears in Magma, The White Review, The Poetry Review, Prototype, and Wasafiri among others. They write about intergenerational inheritances, queer cosmologies, and slippery hauntings as counters to colonial and heteropatriarchal legacies