Sidewinder

This poetic memoir explores the illusion of agency and the descent from fascination into manipulation, revealing how power and circumstance direct the choices of teenagers.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough returns with a fierce, luminous exploration of power, desire and survival.Sidewinder is a poetic memoir that traces a relationship which begins as fascination and descends into coercion. Through a sequence of vivid, cinematic poems, Sennitt Clough examines the illusion of agency – how teenage girls believe they are choosing, when in truth they are being chosen.Set against the soundtrack and grit of 1990s Britain, these poems chart a young woman’s entanglement with an older man who exerts control through charisma, myth and manipulation. As the voice matures, the collection becomes an act of recovery: a reckoning with what was taken, and what can be reclaimed through language.Sennitt Clough writes with devastating precision and lyrical courage, transforming trauma into testimony. Sidewinder unflinchingly exposes the intersections of gender, class and power, and asks how we make sense of experience when the story we were told was never ours to begin with.A haunting and necessary book, Sidewinder confirms Elisabeth Sennitt Clough as one of the most important poetic voices of her generation.