Exposure / Ideal Palace

Melissa Lee Houghton

An award-winning poet’s uncompromising return from a seven year hiatus.

Exposure / Ideal Palace is a compelling double-feature presented in a bespoke landscape format. A lyrical exploration of excess, sensuality, desire, mental wellbeing, homelessness, metaphysics and impossible love. Written between Manchester, London and Sparty Lea, it interrogates a tumultuous career and a culture of fear and hypocrisy.

Exposure bears lyric witness to a woman and artist living under increasingly impossible social and personal conditions. These original and sophisticated poems are addressed to lovers, family, friends and imagined others. As well as being mischievous and biting critiques of contemporary poetry and wider culture — volatile recompense for abusers, exs and literary betrayals.

Ideal Palace takes influence from Ferdinand Cheval’s naive architecture. Exploring psychoanalysis, science and history wielded into a radical dreamscape.

In a refusal to limit the work to conservative editorial standards this collection accommodates radical form — a landscape format for the long and unrestrained lines — embracing the full and vast vision of the poet.