Carcanet Press - Claudine Toutoungi

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Reviews
Awards

Claudine Toutoungi is a poet and playwright. She was born in Warwickshire, studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford and has worked as an actor, a BBC radio drama producer, English teacher, and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow for Newnham and Selwyn College, Cambridge. Carcanet published her debut poetry collection Smoothie in 2017. This was followed by Two Tongues (2020), which won the Ledbury Prize for Second Collection. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish and her live poetry contributions to festivals include Tongue Fu, Poetry East and appearances on BBC Radio 4. Her plays for theatre include Bit Part and Slipping (Stephen Joseph Theatre) and her many audio dramas for BBC Radio 4 include Deliverers, The Inheritors and The Voice in my Ear. She lives in Cambridge.

'Those who have enjoyed Toutoungi's work as it has appeared in widespread publications are sure to find even greater depths of enjoyment and intellectual connection with Emotional Support Horse.'

Martha Luke, The Indiependent

'Moving between levity and gravitas, between erudition and instinct, Toutoungi's seriously playful engagement with language mines words and phrases to expose sudden heart-stopping emotion.'

Greta Stoddart

'These are poems of great wit and guile, tender and smart and beautiful. If there's a family line, it's from Stevie Smith's domestic macabre or Frederick Seidel's undercuts, but Emotional Support Horse confirms Claudine Toutoungi as a remarkable talent and a one-off. I loved it.'

Michael Symmons Roberts

'Mishearings, misspellings, mistranslations, and other kinds of linguistic slippages abound in this collection.... Toutoungi is a poet who takes the pun seriously as a poetic mode: in her hands wordplay is able to bring us beyond the sense-logic of denotation and reveal something about the ineluctable materiality of words, both spoken and written. And the effect of this is strangely liberating: an expansion of linguistic possibility that reminds us that what we may take for common-sense (that most pernicious mechanism of control) may be made to be otherwise.'

Padraig Regan, The Friday Critique

'The wealth of invention, of suggestion, in her latest collection is overwhelming, leaving the reader aghast at her lexical brilliance, her feeling for, and utter embrace, of language's transformative powers, through the dissemination of knowledge and its mystical relationship with perception...Two Tongues is both ambitious and heroically self-exposed.'

Steve Whittaker, Yorkshire Times

'Two Tongues is a collection of singularly energetic grace, whose rueful, restless poems are as fascinated by what others want us to be, as by what we want to be ourselves.'
W. N. Herbert
'Delightful and dramatic... Unfailingly entertaining, these weary, witty poems force us to look at the flimsiness of this set we strut.'
Clare Pollard
'Toutoungi is one to watch. She knows how to get under our skin.'
Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry
'Claudine Toutoungi's Smoothie is a jet of multilingual exuberance... This exuberance infects the format of the poems, which are often organized to look carelessly draped across the page, as if the phrases decided to linebreak of their own spontaneous accord... this is, in many ways, what you want from a début collection: a willingness to experiment with tones and voices, and the promise of deeper excavations in the future.'
Claire Trévien, Poetry London
'Behind all the variety, humour and apparent whimsicality, most of the poems celebrate resilience. It gradually dawns how unusual this is: the poems don't confess, regret or lament - they declare an intention to resist'
Laurie Smith, Magma
'This is one of Toutoungi's typically playful-but-serious poems: we may grin, but we can still taste the bitter and ridiculous invincibility of certain kinds of power.'
Claudine's poem 'The Opposite of Confidential' from Smoothie was Guardian Poem of the Week, 26th March 2018
'Reading Toutoungi's collection feels, in more ways than one, like indulging in a long, cool drink, only to be occasionally surprised by its intriguing yet refreshing aftertaste.' 'It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens, woe betide the over cautious critic who fails to register both excitement and eager anticipation of more to come. Simon Armitage's first book (Zoom) burst in on me like that, as did Selima Hill's (Saying Hello at the Station). Now, I am delighted to say, I have been ambushed by excellence again.'
Peter Pegnall, Ploughshares
'One way of judging a book is by whether it stays with you after you've read it. This is a book that does. Perhaps that's because it's peculiarly vivid. Perhaps it's because it has genuine wit, or because of its lightness of touch, or its sophistication or inventiveness, or the rigour of the logic that holds the poems together. But actually I think it's because it also has a kind of unafraid honesty, a quality completely unrelated to the skill of writing, but so crucial to the best poetry.'
Mark Waldron

Awards won by Claudine Toutoungi Winner, 2021 The Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections (Two Tongues)

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Claudine Toutoungi Books by this author: Emotional Support Horse Two Tongues Smoothie About Reviews Awards Claudine Toutoungi is a poet and playwright. She was born in Warwickshire, studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford and has worked as an actor, a BBC radio drama producer, English teacher, and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow for Newnham and Selwyn College, Cambridge. Carcanet published her debut poetry collection Smoothie in 2017. This was followed by Two Tongues (2020), which won the Ledbury Prize for Second Collection. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish and her live poetry contributions to festivals include Tongue Fu, Poetry East and appearances on BBC Radio 4. Her plays for theatre include Bit Part and Slipping (Stephen Joseph Theatre) and her many audio dramas for BBC Radio 4 include Deliverers, The Inheritors and The Voice in my Ear. She lives in Cambridge. 'Those who have enjoyed Toutoungi's work as it has appeared in widespread publications are sure to find even greater depths of enjoyment and intellectual connection with Emotional Support Horse.' Martha Luke, The Indiependent 'Moving between levity and gravitas, between erudition and instinct, Toutoungi's seriously playful engagement with language mines words and phrases to expose sudden heart-stopping emotion.' Greta Stoddart 'These are poems of great wit and guile, tender and smart and beautiful. If there's a family line, it's from Stevie Smith's domestic macabre or Frederick Seidel's undercuts, but Emotional Support Horse confirms Claudine Toutoungi as a remarkable talent and a one-off. I loved it.' Michael Symmons Roberts 'Mishearings, misspellings, mistranslations, and other kinds of linguistic slippages abound in this collection.... Toutoungi is a poet who takes the pun seriously as a poetic mode: in her hands wordplay is able to bring us beyond the sense-logic of denotation and reveal something about the ineluctable materiality of words, both spoken and written. And the effect of this is strangely liberating: an expansion of linguistic possibility that reminds us that what we may take for common-sense (that most pernicious mechanism of control) may be made to be otherwise.' Padraig Regan, The Friday Critique 'The wealth of invention, of suggestion, in her latest collection is overwhelming, leaving the reader aghast at her lexical brilliance, her feeling for, and utter embrace, of language's transformative powers, through the dissemination of knowledge and its mystical relationship with perception...Two Tongues is both ambitious and heroically self-exposed.' Steve Whittaker, Yorkshire Times 'Two Tongues is a collection of singularly energetic grace, whose rueful, restless poems are as fascinated by what others want us to be, as by what we want to be ourselves.' W. N. Herbert 'Delightful and dramatic... Unfailingly entertaining, these weary, witty poems force us to look at the flimsiness of this set we strut.' Clare Pollard 'Toutoungi is one to watch. She knows how to get under our skin.' Dilys Wood, Artemis Poetry 'Claudine Toutoungi's Smoothie is a jet of multilingual exuberance... This exuberance infects the format of the poems, which are often organized to look carelessly draped across the page, as if the phrases decided to linebreak of their own spontaneous accord... this is, in many ways, what you want from a début collection: a willingness to experiment with tones and voices, and the promise of deeper excavations in the future.' Claire Trévien, Poetry London 'Behind all the variety, humour and apparent whimsicality, most of the poems celebrate resilience. It gradually dawns how unusual this is: the poems don't confess, regret or lament - they declare an intention to resist' Laurie Smith, Magma 'This is one of Toutoungi's typically playful-but-serious poems: we may grin, but we can still taste the bitter and ridiculous invincibility of certain kinds of power.' *Claudine's poem 'The Opposite of Confidential' from Smoothie* was Guardian Poem of the Week, 26th March 2018** 'Reading Toutoungi's collection feels, in more ways than one, like indulging in a long, cool drink, only to be occasionally surprised by its intriguing yet refreshing aftertaste.' 'It is rare that a first collection of poems bounces into the mind like a gifted child, difficult, effervescent, wildly inventive and not to be silenced. When it happens, woe betide the over cautious critic who fails to register both excitement and eager anticipation of more to come. Simon Armitage's first book (Zoom) burst in on me like that, as did Selima Hill's (Saying Hello at the Station). Now, I am delighted to say, I have been ambushed by excellence again.' Peter Pegnall, Ploughshares 'One way of judging a book is by whether it stays with you after you've read it. This is a book that does. Perhaps that's because it's peculiarly vivid. Perhaps it's because it has genuine wit, or because of its lightness of touch, or its sophistication or inventiveness, or the rigour of the logic that holds the poems together. But actually I think it's because it also has a kind of unafraid honesty, a quality completely unrelated to the skill of writing, but so crucial to the best poetry.' Mark Waldron Awards won by Claudine Toutoungi Winner, 2021 The Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections (Two Tongues)	Share this... 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