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Poetry Focus On: Tiffany Anne Tondut

Eyewear is very glad to feature a poem by Tiffany Anne Tondut - pictured - this blustery London Sunday. Tondut is a confessional poet, performance poetry tutor at The City Lit and columnist for The Chap magazine. Born in 1981 and raised in Cambridge, she undertook her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Theatre Studies at The University of Essex, from which she graduated with First Class Honours in 2005. Her first play Plagued was performed at The Lakeside Theatre. Over the next three years she developed her playwriting with The Soho Theatre before returning to poetry. In 2008 she won a publication in Poetry News followed by appearances in magazines including Nutshell and Rising. She has a CW Poetry MA from Kingston University.



 Her work has been published in a number of anthologies including Split Screen, Penning Perfumes, E17 Poetry Trail and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam. In August 2012, her debut chap book The God of Love is Stained was publishedby Silkworms Ink, available to read online. She is currently working on her first full length collection.  One of London's most original and compelling new poetry voices, Tondut is a fearless celebrant of the powers and perils of love, and poetry, and seems likely to continue to say and write what others only dream of, and many fear to utter, in a style her own, but toughly, wittily, poignantly derived from film noir, Americana, pulp, and desire in all its forms.



Follow her @tiffanyannepoet or read her newly re-launched blog, Poetry, and other dangerous things.




sex is a bitch from heaven (after charles bukowski’s ‘love is a dog from hell’)

w/ hands of nails
cigarette nipples
teeth that bite
thru solid pink babies
eyes like canons
my hunter green eyes
i prefer champagne
drink revolver red wine
shipwrecks
death cars
& duende excite me
it’s not you i’m interested in
i’d sooner have school boys
w/ hazelnut hair
in straw yellow boaters

eyes like canons
my hunter green eyes

my bin is blooming
w/durex (extra safe)
supposedly
numbing sensitivity
i pull two of them out

the walls of my bedroom are venus white

alex is gun smoke
ollie is pale swan
(but henry stayed in brighton)

i’ve got windows
the colour of outer space
hunter green eyes
venus bedroom
dull virtuous moon

there’s no ticking inside me
just a bomb
i sense something swimming up
inside a canal:
memories of shipwrecks

my grandfather had american teeth
my father has gold teeth
and one drunk night near the death
of his married life
he crawled into my room crying:
forgive me
you won’t see me again
like this

and henry might yet still come
pale swan is coming tomorrow
but gun smoke is coming any minute now

so i pour myself a glass
of revolver red wine
and wait
in my venus bedroom.


poem by Tiffany A. Tondut; reprinted online with the author's permission


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