Ovarium: Reading and Q&A with poet Joanna Ingham

Thursday 25 August | 5pm

Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. Ingham charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance.

Ingham’s poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.

Bio:

Joanna Ingham writes poetry and fiction. She grew up in Suffolk and has recently returned to live there after many years in London and Hertfordshire. Naming Bones, her first pamphlet, was published by ignitionpress in 2019 and she won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition in 2020. She has worked in community arts, facilitating creative writing workshops in a wide variety of settings. She lives with her husband and daughter.