{"id":4183,"date":"2013-10-12T22:03:08","date_gmt":"2013-10-12T22:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/?p=4183"},"modified":"2025-12-04T10:39:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T10:39:16","slug":"beautiful-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/2013\/10\/beautiful-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Beautiful Girls<\/i> is not a book for the faint-hearted. The reader has been invited to a sleepover at the asylum, a night in which five-year old girls drift alone through the wards, where the mentally unstable do sit-ups when nobody is watching and where heaven is a place between &#8220;the sky and the planets&#8221; reserved for those with personality disorders. This collection will be a home-to-home for sufferers and a journey through terrible night for those who&#8217;ve been fortunate enough to take the non-scenic route in life. Melissa Lee-Houghton significantly moves us on from any romanticising notion of the &#8216;mad&#8217; poet driven through suffering to achieve their full genius. Mental suffering is here shown in all its nocturnal and diurnal detail: the nurses, the drugs, the lack of sleep; the disconnect from the yearned-for true self. <em>Beautiful Girls<\/em> will survive as a testament to poetry&#8217;s force in overcoming. (<em>Chris McCabe<\/em>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this hypnotic and arresting collection Melissa Lee-Houghton holds a mirror to our mouths and teaches us how to breathe so that hurts like hell. (<i>Abegail Morley<\/i>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[173,4,27,29],"tags":[97,115,123],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4183"}],"version-history":[{"count":59,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17089,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4183\/revisions\/17089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}