Jenna Clake's Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes, and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying: public and private jars of peanut butter, a tray of lemons, unfurling chocolate bar wrappers. In turning to television, childhood films, and social media accounts, her collection investigates how to reveal and conceal, what it means to have a secret, to be intimate, to navigate something that should be natural, but feels sickly, sour, and wrong.
Museum of Ice Cream is Jenna Clake's second collection, following her debut Fortune Cookie (2017), winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, which was also shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award.
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Then came the day that we saw a cloud attached to a parachute, heading down towards us. CLOUD APPRECIATION SOCIETY
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 22 April 2021, ebook, 64 pages, #ARC from the publisher via @edelweiss_squad)
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This collection is my introduction to the poet and I'll definitely seek out more of her work. I really enjoyed the poems on offer here, all excellent examples of the best kind of contemporary poetry; vivid, intense, full of modern life and modern references. The poems cover a wide range of subjects from love and identity to the pitfalls of modern life including social media. I particularly enjoyed I Would Die For You In The Best Way Possible, Vixen, Like Other Women, Jen's Sweet Shop and Quayside of Dogs.