Composed in two halves, Erica Gillingham’s The Human Body is a Hive is a playful and observant reconception of queer love and queer family-making. Opening with a shameless celebration of sex and desire, the collection expands the boundaries of love to include friendship, romance, and lifelong partnership. The latter catalogues the cyclical heartbreaks and wonders of fertility treatment through the microscopic lenses of nature, medicine, and art. Both quietly moving and profoundly celebratory, this exciting debut evokes tenderness and resilience.
‘The Human Body is a Hive is a luminous debut pamphlet that “[startles the reader] by its fresh presence.” Amidst the joys and complexities of queer family-making, Gillingham offers us tender, sensual and profound poems suffused with a tensile strength.’ – Mary Jean Chan, author of Fleché, winner of The Costa Poetry Award
‘An elegant lyric poem navigating the wide vistas and deep griefs of trying to conceive. A joyful and sensuous addition to the lesbian literary canon. Beautiful.’ – Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto & Othered Poems, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize