Pester

Holly Pester, a poet whose 2021 debut Comic Timing was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize, cut her teeth at disorderly open mic nights and has, as a result, a keen interest in the difference between delivery and performance. Both are essential, she says, “whether it’s at a poetry reading or on the page”. They might be considered synonymous, she told Frieze magazine in a 2021 interview, “but I like to remember that the text is always there, it’s like a score, a contract”. No surprise, then, that The…

The British poet and academic Holly Pester’s debut novel is about how easy it is to lose yourself when you don’t have a place to truly call home. In The Lodgers, an unnamed narrator returns to a town where she has arranged to sublet a flat. It’s less than ideal: the living room is “an absurdly awkward corner shape” and the whole place smells of “men’s shower gel and repeated nights of instant noodles”. The woman has chosen this flat because it overlooks her mother’s house, though her mother, whom she calls Moffa, is…

BloodMy mother told everyone in the villageand at the local art college that she’d die for a bloodvelvet cake in the shape of a house. All day I receivedand hid progressively larger eventuallylife-sized blood cake houses. The art students made thebiggest and most ambitious. It didn’t fit in my camerascope. She can always fake cry. Especially in my camera scope.The local paper asked how amazed she was.This is worse than the time she got several abused ponies.She turned to me and whispered how extremely creepy andartistic…