Beautiful Girls, the second collection by Blackburn-based poet Melissa Lee-Houghton, has been selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Winter 2013.

Melissa, whose first book A Body Made of You, came out from Penned in the Margins in 2011, said:

It’s the best news ever, and it still hasn’t sunk in.

Beautiful Girls, described by Chris McCabe as ‘a sleepover at the asylym’ and ‘a testament to poetry’s force in overcoming’,  is due out in November 2013 and will be launched together with new books by Siddhartha Bose and Hannah Silva at Toynbee Theatre, London on 14 November.

This selection comes just two weeks after The Shipwrecked House by Claire Trevien was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, marking a particularly strong year in our poetry publishing programme.