Real Cute Danger
Broken Sleep Books
2022
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OUT NOW!
Real Cute Danger views the experience of having children through the prism of horror and science fiction. It’s concerned with how the process of pregnancy and childbirth peels back your human trappings and exposes you for the animal you are, the treatment of women and women’s bodies during and post-pregnancy, and how the devastating cocktail of love and fear served up by a child can change you, sometimes in disturbing ways.
Praise for Real Cute Danger:
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"Angela Cleland captures the fear and heartbreak of pregnancy, birth and motherhood with sharp and unexpected humour. Her work is strikingly original, drawing on horror and apocalyptic genres as well as the lyrical. This collection is so terrifying and sad and funny - so completely on point. After reading this, you will never be the same again."
— Alison Winch, Darling, it’s Me
"The poems in Real Cute Danger are sharply observed, funny and tender, as well as brilliantly inventive. It's an achingly honest account of early motherhood, and I found it very moving."
— Kate Potts, Feral
Room of Thieves
Salt Publishing
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2013
A six toed cat skeleton, a lesson in boxing technique and a poem in the shape of a phallus. These are just some of the things you can expect from Cleland's second collection, Room of Thieves.
Work that deftly treads the line between the serious and the comic, characterised by compelling imagery, fresh conceits and strong narrative voices.
An accessible, enjoyable collection from a poet with sharp eyes and a dark wit.
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In Angela Cleland you feel you’ve made a remarkable personal discovery: at last!, you think, here’s a poet whose precision of language and breadth of vision transforms the everyday into extraordinary art. Emotions and intimacies are subjected to the same clear-eyed, and eye-opening treatment as nature, myth, and exotic locations. Cleland is a poet to treasure.
- Robert Vas Dias
Sequela
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Gauge
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2013
Kester Lowe is the next big thing in viral fashion. For the price of a Brinkov suit you could be wearing one of his exclusively engineered STVs. And once you put it on, almost everyone will want you...
At least, that's the plan. When Kester infects Alexis Farrell with one of his signature viruses, showing her what he is capable of first-hand, she employs him to head up her new viral design department at techno-pharmaceutical giant V. Farrell will stop at nothing to make Kester a star, but not everyone is a fan. Those offended by what he represents, those he has betrayed, his own suppressed ambitions and forgotten promises - Kester is racking up enemies and they are about to come together in an attempt to destroy him.
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...this pseudonymous debut...is a sci-fi masterwork....an utterly readable novel, not only impossible to put down, but conceptually mind-blowing...Extraordinary—a visionary tour de force.
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
And in Here, The Menagerie
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Templar Poetry
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2007
Angela Cleland's remarkable debut fizzes with life. Each poem conjures its own world, focused, poised and true. The poems are united by a dark fascination for the moments when we teeter on the edge. They visit loss, guilt, anxiety and the struggle for expression, the moments when we feel ourselves hanging onto the edge of existence by our fingernails.
Wide open to experience, fears, loves and hates, these poems are unafraid of taking risks and find all sorts of forms to perfect their expression, from free verse to concrete - Cleland even permits herself a graph. As bright and enjoyable as it is dark and uncomfortable.
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A remarkable and highly enjoyable debut from Angela Cleland. Her poems are skilful, witty and inventive, and her oblique approach pierces the heart of life.
- Moniza Alvi
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Angela Cleland’s first collection rings true; poignant, quirky and knowing. These assured poems deserve to be heard.
- Jane Weir
Waiting to Burn
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Templar Poetry
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2006
Waiting to Burn was one of the winners of the Templar Poetry and Pamphlet Competition 2012.
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particularly notable was Angela Cleland's powerful title sequence in Waiting to Burn.
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-Poetry Book Society Bulletin