Denise Riley (England) 1948

Denise Riley (England)

1948

Born in Carlisle, England in 1948, Denise Riley graduated from both Cambridge and Oxford, where she concentrated on philosophy and literature, later bringing together her abilities as a philosopher, feminist, literary historian, and lyric poet.

     Over the years she has published several books of criticism, including War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle) (2004), and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005). She also edited Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991(1992) and, with Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, The Language, Discourse, Society Reader (2004).

      Her short book Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012) Is a meditation on the passage of time after the sudden death of a child.

       Among her many books of poetry are Marxism for Infants (1977), No Fee (1978), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993 (1993), Denise Riley: Selected Poems (2000), Say Something Back (2016), Selected Poems (2019), Say Something Back / Lived Time, / Without Its Flow (2020), and Lurex (2022).

        She has been the A. D. White professor-at-large at Cornell University, the writer-in-residence at the Tate Gallery, and Professor of poetry and history of ideas at East Anglia. She currently lives in London.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Marxism for Infants (Cambridge, UK: Street Editions, 1977); No Fee (Cambridge, UK: Street Editions, 1978); Dry Air (London: Virago: 1985); Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993 (London: Reality Street Editions, 1993); Penguin Modern Poets 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair) (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1996); Denise Riley: Selected Poems (London: Reality Street, 2000); Say Something Back (London: Picador, 2016); Szantung (Lodz: Dom Literatury (2019) [English-Polish bilingual edition, selected and translated by Jerzy Jarniewicz]; Selected Poems (London: Picador 2019); Say Something Back / Time Lived, / Without Its Flow (New York: New York Review Books, 2020); Lurex (London: Picador 2022)

To read a poem by Riley, go here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/118581/lone-star-clattering