Bernadette Cremin has previously worked as a social worker, tea lady, sociology lecturer, TEFL teacher, bank clerk and waitress. This chequered and eclectic career path has invaluably enriched her true vocation of poet and performer. This collection follows hot on the heels of her prize-winning debut volume Perfect Mess (Biscuit Publishing, 2006).

For more information on Bernadette Cremin, visit www.bernadettecremin.co.uk.

Cremin’s world is a blanched bohemia of scatter-cushioned experiences, liaisons, vicissitudes, serendipities and epiphanies. A reality heaving with animism, where the inanimate is as intimate a part as a lover’s lips or a racing pulse. Where the wallpaper has ears and ‘creases gossip’; where every object has a muttering life of its own. Enter this realm where ‘mirrors glare’, ‘shrubs gang up like playground bullies’, and trees resemble ‘skinny dinner ladies’; of ‘terrified white’ toilets and wall-crawling shadows; and you’ll probably never get out again. But really, even if you could, would you want to?

Cremin’s poems are the reminder we need of forgotten people, desperate lives and sickness that doesn’t grab headlines. Undaunted, bloody minded, she hands them to us with more twists and turns than a roller coaster. They’re uncomfortable reading but Cremin makes us shudder with immense skill and utter control. She’s an important voice
Jackie Wills

Speechless reads like a series of nightmarish postcards from prisons of illness, passion and of self – or flashes of broken down stations caught through the fumy window of a run away train
Mario Petrucci

…weird and wonderful; Cremin dares to write honestly. Where does she get these images? Her similes are inspired
Michael Donaghy

Cremin writes of call girls and ham actors, moody photos and bed-sit divas. In lines both precise and honest, she croons of violence and loss. Hers is the smoky voice of an underclass, forever tough, feminine and vulnerable.
John O’Donoghue

Cremin has built a magic bridge between performance and the page; she has proven palpably and infectiously, how there needn’t be such a divide in the first place. Speechless is quite aptly titled, for that’s exactly how it leaves one: it proves that Cremin’s poetry is as tangible and affecting on the page as it is when uttered from her lips like subtle spells
Alan Morrison

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