Creation/Destruction
Writers often refer to their books as their babies – but what about texts about babies themselves?
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
‘Babies eat books. But they spit out fragments which can be put together afterward.’ – Jazmina Barrera, from Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes.
While the task of making and raising children is often framed as conventional drudgery, it has in fact inspired risk-taking work that presses against the boundaries of genre, language, and social convention. The constraints of parenting, it seems, propel poets into the hybrid and forbidden.
In this generative and critical workshop, we will close-read writers Carmen Giménez, Hiromi Itō, Kim Hyesoon, and Jazmina Barrera for their experimentation in form, voice, and content. We will also create our own work – not shying away from abandonment, cannibalism, or other destructive taboos evoked by the poets we read.
3 fortnightly Zoom sessions on Thursdays, 7–9pm (BST/GMT), starts 23 Oct 2025.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
What to Expect
Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.
Image Credit: @codingcow-lee
About April Yee 
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April Yee’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been named Best of the Net, two-time The Best American Essays Notable, and winner of the Manchester Fiction Prize and Ivan Juritz Prize. A Harvard alumna and former journalist, she reported in more than a dozen countries at sites ranging from Chernobyl to Iraqi oil fields before moving to London, where she has served as The Georgia Review’s editor-in-residence, Refugee Journalism Project mentor, and trustee at Spread the Word. Her work on interests such as racial fraud and reproductive autonomy is in The Times Literary Supplement, The Offing, and Electric Literature, and she has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Southbank Centre, the National Book Critics Circle, the Community of Writers, Ledbury Poetry Critics, and the University of East Anglia, where she was the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholar. Collaborators have transformed her work into song, video, visual art, and sound installation.
"I came to The Poetry School after a recommendation by a therapeutic writing tutor. Being able to write poems about my experience has been cathartic and inspiring & has had a positive effect on my health."
Radical Rhythms
The Spaces Between
The Poetry of Picture Books