C+nto & Othered Poems

C+nto & Othered Poems reclaims two things at once, the word the title barely veils and the history it belongs to: the butch lesbian counterculture of London in the 1980s and 1990s, the dyke bars and club nights where working class women in suits and shaved heads built a world because the world outside would not have them. Joelle Taylor lived that history, and her book is its memorial and its defense, a suite whose title twists the canto of the Italian epic tradition because what it sings is an epic, protection rackets of love and style, the codes of the bar, the friends brutalized by strangers and police, the ones who did not survive, and the body itself, the butch body, presented as territory that had to be defended and is here finally celebrated. Taylor came up through spoken word, and the poems carry performance's direct address and rhythmic drive while working the page with real formal range, monologues, sequences, prose blocks, elegies; the Eliot chair Glyn Maxwell called it a blazing book of rage and light, which is the right pairing, since the fury is everywhere lit by tenderness and by the glamour of a scene rendered in loving period detail. It won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, announced in January 2022, a landmark: a book of openly butch lesbian history, from a poet formed in poetry slams rather than universities, taking Britain's most valuable poetry award, and the Polari Prize for LGBTQ writing followed. Taylor had spent two decades building other people's voices, founding and running the national youth slam championships; the prize turned the platform toward her own.