Maryville
Joelle Taylor
With a vividly sketched cast of characters, award-winning poet Joelle Taylor uses the Maryville butch bar as a lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are rendered in awe-inspiring high definition in a collection as filmic as it is familiar.
A hybrid chronicle, magic trick, television series, prayer and insurrection, Maryville conjures ghosts back to their bodies, a community to their feet. The four butches introduced in C+NTO & Othered Poems return transplanted into the Maryville bar in 1957 as teenagers. They bring with them stories of incarceration, escape, and resilience – a quality that will mark their friendship for the next 50 years. Through the Maryville’s darkened windows, we watch the Gay Liberation Front stagger to its feet, a nascent women’s liberation movement bite off its bindings, squat culture’s wild spread across the city, the fight against Clause 28, the Brixton Riots, the Sex Wars and much more. Inside, the Maryville has its own rituals, its own revolutions to consider. More than anything the Maryville is a safe space to be dangerous. Women find themselves in each other’s faces while outside Boy-Boy’s howl their infinite carols.
About the Author
Joelle Taylor is the author of 5 collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted both for theatre, and into a television screenplay, and was featured on the Radio Three documentary Butch. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre and tours her work nationally and internationally from Queen Elizabeth Hall to Sydney Opera House, from Australia to Brazil. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including the Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her most recent radio program A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror was broadcast at the end of last year on BBC Radio Four. In 2023 and 2024 she toured the UK as a part of Blue Now, directed by Neil Bartlett and featuring Russell Tovey, Travis Alabanza and Jay Bernard. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a former Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honored with a DIVA Award for Outstanding Contribution and named in the 2025 Pride Power list.
“One of the most powerful voices of our time is what it takes to reveal the silenced generations of lesbians. I have been reading and writing poetry for fifty years, and this is new; it’s unlike anything we have ever encountered. Joelle Taylor is a genius, writing poetry onto a stage it has not lived on before, making this an addictive page-turner about the queer family of the past we need to be versed in, so we can stand with triumph and gratitude when we stand on their intrepid shoulders. This book is so much bigger than a book”
— CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
“Diving deep into our collective queer history, Joelle Taylor brings back treasure, spinning traces of the bad old days into a wrong-walking love letter to all the women who went before us. Sexy, fearless – and ravishingly beautiful”
— Neil Bartlett, author of Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
“C+NTO was such a great poetry collection, I feared Maryville would be a lesser work but I was wrong. It delivers even more layers of brilliance and linguistic ingenuity. Taylor’s poetry is as dangerous as it is dexterous, as sophisticated and tensely coiled as it is a wildfire blazing free, as unclichéd as it is unpredictable, as emotionally engrossing as it is imaginatively mind-blowing. From the very first lines that ignite the imagination to the last lines foretelling the dying embers of an era, this is a consistently dazzling work of art”
— Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other
“Kaleidoscopic in its breath, structure and humanity, Maryville is that rare thing: a collection that is both selfless and intimate, integrally formal yet full of risk and surprise”
— Anthony Joseph, T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of Sonnets for Albert
“Maryville is lesbian life made lyrical, wrapped in jagged emotion. A captivating image of how we change each other, how we shape ourselves, and how we persevere”
— Eleanor Medhurst, author of Unsuitable
“With inimitable flair, Joelle Taylor honors a woefully underrepresented identity, rendering unfairly maligned butch dykes magnificent. Maryville is a bold and exhilarating depiction of the nuances, ecstasies and agonies of lesbian life. It is also fantastically entertaining, deeply moving and very sexy. Joelle’s writing is so thrilling. I loved this book”
— Roxy Bourdillon, author of What A Girl Wants
