Maryville

With a vividly sketched cast of characters, award-winning poet Joelle Taylor uses the Maryville butch bar as a lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are rendered in awe-inspiring high definition in a collection as filmic as it is familiar. A hybrid chronicle, magic trick, television series, prayer and insurrection, Maryville conjures ghosts back to their bodies, a community to their feet. The four butches introduced in Cunto & Othered Poems return transplanted into the Maryville bar in 1957 as teenagers. They bring with them stories of incarceration, escape, and resilience - a quality that will mark their friendship for the next 50 years. Through the Maryville's darkened windows, we watch the Gay Liberation Front stagger to its feet, a nascent women's liberation movement bite off its bindings, squat culture's wild spread across the city, the fight against Clause 28, the Brixton Riots, the Sex Wars and much more. Inside, the Maryville has its own rituals, its own revolutions to consider. More than anything the Maryville is a safe space to be dangerous. Women find themselves in each other's faces while outside Boy-Boy's howl their infinite carols.