Emily Bauer

About

You look at the pig. Your eye meets with its body; the bristles of a broom, a dark valley of groin, and your eye becomes a hand tracing a firm frontier. The pig is stubborn and refuses you.

You write about the pig. Your language gropes out towards it, tracing it again. This time, the pig begins to elongate, extending laterally with the sentences, unfolding into a pig of lithe potential, a pig that slips into other things. The written pig ruts through the paddock of the page, a place where time tugs and stretches. It is still stubborn, still refusing, but now this refusal is also an opening.

My practice is built through the world’s pig-headed refusals, a testament to belligerent subjects which transform under the pen.

My recent work, A Hunting Poem, explores the poetics of pursuit. It is a series of fable-like stories embedded in a world foremostly without language: a landscape, a labour, an animal body. Yet, it is also committed to stressing the potential networks that are waiting between all worlds, those which writing is able to trace and enliven. By creating a dense thicket of image and reference the piece aims to demonstrate the erratic movements that occur within the unified whole of a written work.

Emily is a Cumbrian writer based in London.

She was the winner of the 2023 Edgar Wind Art Writing Prize and was shortlisted for the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize for poetry. Her recent conversation piece with Rachael Allen and Joe Dunthorne will be published in the upcoming issue of The Toe Rag

Alongside writing, she is an assistant editor and illustrator for New Papers, a publication of fiction and poetry.

Contact: Emilybauer168@gmail.com