On Girlhood: from Hello Kitty to the Virgin Mary
A conversation between Ellora Sutton and Imogen Wade
Imogen Wade, Ellora Sutton
Ellora Sutton, author of Little Bitch (Verve, 2026), and Imogen Wade, author of Girl, Swooning (Corsair, 2026), met in Goldfinch Books, Alton, Hampshire, to chat girlhood and God. They discovered that they live ten minutes apart and are now best friends.
Ellora Sutton: Should we start with the painting?
Imogen Wade: Yeah. So, one of the things that I could not believe when I was reading Little Bitch, was that we’d done an ekphrastic poem about the same painting, out of all the paintings in the world: Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
ES: I couldn’t believe it. But that was just the first coincidence, the first rhyme, between our books. It very much set the tone.
IW: There are so many similarities between the books. They’re both dedicated to mothers. They both have dreams, darkness, dental records. We can talk more about the ekphrastic poetry. Yours is called ‘The Angel Gabriel Visits Mary in Bedlam’. Mine’s called ‘Women in Art’. In your poem, you use blank space and line breaks, a masterful mise-en-page, to convey the mental disarray of Mary. As a reader, I felt I could go into the poem. I was in her mind, which was beautiful. There’s this line: ‘Doctor’s Note: she’s been speaking in tongues again.’ But as a reader, we have access to her interior experience.
ES: I think the reverse is true in your poem, ‘Women in Art’. We don’t have access to Mary’s interior experience. That’s kind of like, the whole point, isn’t it? ‘Her thoughts were her own, unable to be entered.’ Even by the speaker of the poem.
IW: In your poem, there’s the line: ‘I tell him no.’ Mary speaks, or at least believes that she is speaking. Whereas in ‘Women in Art’, she has no voice. She’s completely unattainable. She cannot be entered. And then there’s the fact that it’s a male god who impregnated Mary, right?
ES: Yeah. And in ‘Women in Art’, you say: ‘It would take / a strange man (in fact, not a man at all) / to hunger for Mary’s white and rumpled bed.’
IW: ‘God’ appears so much in both books. I wonder, Ellora, what is your relationship to that word?
ES: I think in Little Bitch the speaker is God. She kind of has a God complex. And I don’t think I do, but I think I would like to. I want to be that diva, I want to be that God. What about yourself, what’s your relationship with God – the word and the entity?
IW: I think my relationship to God is a kind of trembling. Desire, mixed with fear, mixed with ambiguity, and a kind of horror. It’s very complicated. Perhaps girls have to think about God much sooner than boys, because He has an exclusively male pronoun in the Abrahamic religions. We have God the Father and his male prophets. We live in a gendered world and, when it comes to cosmological hierarchies, as well as the language of mankind, we learn quickly that we are not the default. Girls have to then define themselves in opposition to divinity. Perhaps girlhood is unconsciously a struggle to work out why God is not a woman.
ES: Oh my God, I love that take.
IW: There’s a line in your poem ‘Cruel Beach’: ‘I suffer like Jesus did.’ I think both Bitch and Girl live in the shadow of violence, especially male violence.
ES: Definitely. Especially in your National Poetry Competition-winning poem, ‘The Time I Was Mugged in New York City’. There’s a shadow of violence there. There’s a real threat when the speaker is shown a knife and told to get in the van.
IW: There’s not a knife.
ES: Is there not a knife?
IW: No. But the fact that you remembered it as a knife is brilliant. Isn’t that brilliant? How you remember poetry, how different it is. There’s definitely not a knife.
ES: No, you’re right. There’s not a knife.
IW: I love that.
ES: I would have bet my life on there being a knife in that poem.
IW: But the fact that you thought there was a knife and there isn’t, doesn’t that say something about how you think threat and then think weapon.
ES: And you think phallic weapon.
IW: I love that. That’s funny. But really, in the poem – it’s unspoken. He never threatens her.
ES: Yeah, no, it’s just: ‘Get in, he / said. There wasn’t a single thought in my / head.’ There’s something very Plathian to me about that internal rhyme there. And then: ‘I found myself inside his van; he / locked the doors immediately after’. That’s a violence, I think. The locking of the doors. Or it’s a contract in which one is telling the other: I can hurt you.
IW: Sometimes a shadow is even more chilling than the thing itself. I found this in your book. There are lots of references to sexual violence, but they’re historical. It’s something in the memory, in the history of Bitch, and we don’t have access to that, but it haunts. Your collection opens with ‘Underglaze Blue’, and a line in it sets the tone of the collection in so many ways: ‘Everyone is haunted here.’ And then, in ‘Concierge’: ‘I am as much a woman / as I am a dream.’ Bitch carries around her hauntings, and that is the context for her voice, for who she is.
ES: What’s the difference – to you and to Girl – between a haunting and a dream? Both are very present in Girl, Swooning.
IW: I think a haunting is something that has happened. I’ve never been haunted by the future. I’ve dreamt of the future. I’m haunted by fears, by ghosts, by memories. But I think with dreams, I dream of things that are, or things that I think could be. But a dream can also exist so far beyond reality, beyond what is possible. In your poem, ‘Mood Ring’, there’s a line: ‘My mother died a long time ago. I’m still getting to know her.’ I’d say that’s a haunting.
ES: Girl is just full of dreams. She’s a dreamer, isn’t she? She’s full of interiority. She’s almost haunted by herself, I think, but then she’s also dreaming of and for herself. ‘Same Dream’ is about a recurring dream that Girl has, about walking through two fields of rape. And I think it’s such a clever and such an interesting poem. Again, it’s the potential for violence. And I think that’s a potentiality that haunts everyone’s life, but especially the lives of women. Maybe a haunting is a repetition.
IW: Yeah, yeah. Haunting is a repetition. Also, when you’re talking about what haunts the lives of women – how about mothers? It’s a thread through your collection, and it starts my collection. Sometimes the absence of a mother increases her presence, if we define ourselves by the gaps in our lives, like chalk outlines on a crime scene.
ES: You know, my book’s dedicated to my mum, who died when I was fifteen. Your book is dedicated to your grandmother. A poem provides a space where you can develop a relationship with a person who’s not there anymore. A kind of bittersweet comfort can be derived, rightly or wrongly, from writing yourself into new scenarios, situations or memories with that person who’s not there anymore. You know, I often wonder what my mum would think of me, if she met me as an adult. Would she recognise me – not visually, but as a person? What do you think about the idea of writing into, to, with and about the people who aren’t with us anymore?
IW: In the poem ‘J’, I imagine an alternative mental space for my grandmother as she lies dying. Instead of in a care-home bed, I imagine her in the stables of her childhood, saddling a horse ready for the final journey. Then in the poems ‘Argos’ and ‘Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you’, I imagine my Poppa becoming a Doberman. He becomes a dog. To me, the most loving thing in all of literature is Odysseus’s dog, Argos, waiting for him. Argos, in the Odyssey, lives an uncommonly long lifespan, over twenty years. He’s, like, completely ancient. He sees Odysseus, and then he just dies. Straight away. All he needed was to see Odysseus one last time. I think by talking to our ghosts in poems, we’re also haunting them. We’re like Argos. We’re waiting. We keep saying their names.
ES: We write the space for them to hopefully return to, which, of course, they never do.
IW: I think poems are monuments. I think both you and I have poems that are monuments to people that we love, and maybe their ghosts live there. What a nice place to rest, right? In a poem by your daughter.
ES: That’s such a beautiful thing to say. Beautiful. But to carry on with death and grief. I think our speakers, Bitch and Girl, have different views on their own mortality.
IW: In some ways, Bitch seems to covet her own death, but death is denied to her. The propulsive energy of Little Bitch is the suffering of being overly alive, even in the absence of wanting to be. In ‘Red Lace’, Bitch tells us: ‘I doubt that I am capable of dying.’ Bitch resents the fact that she’s incapable of absence. And then we’ve got Girl, who wants to live forever. She’s haunted by mortality.
ES: Girl is haunted by mortality. Bitch dreams of it. She wants to rest. But there’s also a playfulness to her death wish – she leans into death and wanting to die, but it’s kind of always in a playful way because if she believes she can’t truly die, what does death mean? I think she wants to rest, but she also just wants to feel real. On the other hand, in ‘Tennis Lesson’, Girl has a dream where she’s being followed, in a threatening way, by a man, but it becomes a kind of blessing: ‘This nightmare has taught you to always be grateful for fear.’
IW: That’s not true. Girl doesn’t appear in that poem. In an earlier draft, it was called ‘Tennis Lesson: in which the reader has a nightmare’.
ES: Yes! It’s so clever, the use of second person. It’s a gift Girl offers to her reader, then: ‘You’re certain now your survival instinct works; you do want to live.’
IW: Right. And also, from the very beginning of Girl, Swooning, my reader is assumed, by default, to be a woman.
ES: Towards the end of your collection there’s a poem called ‘Ferring’, which ends: ‘I want to paint my nails green / and light a fuse and never die.’ I love the detail of painting the nails. There’s a girliness there. It’s something that might feel quite ephemeral, but then it’s paired with something eternal, to ‘never die’. The ephemerality of girlhood, which isn’t actually so ephemeral at all. This is present elsewhere, in a more violent way, in your poem ‘The Perils of Teledentistry’: ‘I bought aligners online & they gave me bone loss / (permanent) above my teeth.’ We – society – can be quick to dismiss concerns with beauty as girlish, flippant, it won’t last because beauty won’t last, it’s fake, but actually these things can have very permanent, very real, very gnarly consequences. Which is the case for Bitch as well.
IW: With the gallbladder.
ES: With the gallbladder. She loses an internal organ because she’s so desperate to be skinny.
IW: There’s this great line in your poem ‘Did It Hurt?’ Bitch says: ‘I’m going to leave my body to science. / Astronomy, probably.’ Then later, in ‘What if it’s Hereditary???’: ‘Let the astrology / of my dental records show: / none of this was effortless.’ There’s something that makes me want to ask, what is your relationship to teeth? Because they appear a lot in Little Bitch.
ES: Teeth are the last resort of a desperate animal. Sometimes, it’s the only weapon that the weaker person has – his, her, their teeth. When you have nothing else, you have those. But also, I think there’s something to be said about dental records. They are used when a body has been so violated and torn apart and de-created that there is no other way to identify a person. They can’t use fingerprints, they can’t use anything else, but they have the dental records. The last testament of the body. How about you? How do you feel about teeth?
IW: I messed them up. I messed my teeth up. I was praying after Communion one Sunday and had a revelation. My God is ‘maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen’ (Nicene Creed). He doesn’t care how wonky my teeth are, how much acne I have, how skinny I am. In church, I feel pure. I feel un-desecrated by my own self-hatred. So in ‘The Perils of Teledentistry’, someone tells her: ‘I think you’re beautiful / & I’ve always wanted to tell you.’ And Girl wonders: ‘It sounds like you look at me with the Lord’s gaze. / If I’d known, would I still be able to eat an apple?’
ES: It’s a sweet thought to have, but I honestly think the answer is no. I know from my own experiences that being told you’re beautiful – which I obviously hear all the time – doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to someone who already has that seed of self-hatred germinating. That’s on the inside, and that does not change. Someone calling you beautiful, that’s so easy to dismiss. But someone – even yourself – saying ‘if you just do this, you’ll be beautiful’? Well, that offers a goal, something concrete. And you’re always going to take that. Because it’s not about wanting to be beautiful. Maybe you think that’s what you want, but really it’s about wanting self-acceptance.
IW: In your poem, ‘In a Field on a Clear Night, I Might Say,’ Bitch says:
What do I have to offer you?
Permission
to call me pretty between dreams,
to witness my wild dreaming.
I interpret that stanza as being very dismissive of the word ‘pretty’. Like, well, that’s nice, and I’ll let you say it, but look at this ‘wild dreaming’. In Girl, Swooning there’s a poem, ‘Monologue by Jane Eyre’, that describes the moment where Rochester says to Jane that he wants to rape her, he wants to kill her. But, actually, if he did those things, he wouldn’t get the bit of her that he wants, because what he wants has to be freely given. It has to be freely given or it ceases to exist. And to me, there’s nothing more romantic than that. Not sure what that says about me.
ES: [Judgemental stare.]
IW: I think the only true love poem in my book is ‘Damsel’, whereas Bitch has quite a few. In ‘Damsel’, Girl actually gives herself permission to be passive, in quite a paradoxically empowering way, right? She knows she’s in love, when the dream shifts from her saving people, to actually being the one who is saved.
ES: I love ‘Damsel’. The permission to be passive. I think that’s what I was trying to express with ‘In a Field on a Clear Night, I Might Say’. Bitch is letting herself be vulnerable. She says: ‘Bruise me / into a gospel of consent’. She’s saying you can hurt me, and you can call me pretty. She’s not saying she’ll believe the lover, but she’s giving them permission to say it. And I think that is a kind of vulnerability. I don’t think it’s passivity, but I do think it’s vulnerability.
IW: And hanging over all of that is a line from another poem in your collection, in ‘How Can I Be Both Trough and Orgasm?’: ‘Oh Butcher, reap me.’ So when Bitch is in a field on a clear night, or on a cruel beach, or eating pork chow mein in the park, I hear her plea – or is it a command? – to the Butcher. I don’t think any of these poems are free from the shadow of death. ‘Damsel’ isn’t, because he’s saving her from death, right, from ‘the sugary mouth of the leopard.’ Shall we move on to exteriority?
ES: Yeah.
IW: I was speaking to the poet Rose Ramsden, who mentioned you in her master’s dissertation—
ES: Which is very flattering.
IW: … and she was speaking about all the pop-cultural references in your work. I was trying to make a list of everything you mention. Historical murders, Hello Kitty, art history, Titanic, Nicole Kidman, Shrek. And that’s all over Little Bitch, right? But then Girl doesn’t have any of that. Girl is an introvert; Bitch is an extrovert.
ES: I think Girl does have exteriority, but it’s with landscape and myth, as opposed to pop culture. For me, I’ve always been a write into your obsessions kind of poet, and my obsessions tend to be rooted in pop culture. For example, I’ve already written a Heated Rivalry poem. I have to write what I have to write about, and I can’t help that. A lot of the time, that will be whatever’s right in my face, whether that’s a meme, or Hello Kitty, or an exhibition I’ve just been to. In Girl, Swooning there are still lots of references – we’ve spoken about the Odyssey, Jane Eyre, and there’s the Bible too. I was at a poetry workshop once and I can’t remember who said it – I think it might have been Stephen Sexton or Cynthia Miller – but they said: ‘poets have always referenced myths; pop culture is just another kind of myth.’ Bitch uses pop culture in the same way that Girl uses myth.
IW: Another difference between Little Bitch and Girl, Swooning is the lyric ‘I’. I get the sense that for Bitch the ‘I’ is a prison because she wants to keep people out, whereas for Girl, ‘I’ is a prison because she wants to let people in and can’t. That’s the suffering. That’s the tension. Girl is trapped, whereas I think Bitch built her prison quite intentionally.
ES: That’s a really interesting take. There’s a poem in Little Bitch called ‘On Cute’. Cute is a form of deception. In evolutionary terms, it’s a defence mechanism. But it can also function as a sort of Trojan horse. I think that’s maybe what the lyric ‘I’ is to Bitch. It’s a cuteness. There’s a great interview Phoebe Stuckes did a while back with Poetry News, where she compares the lyric ‘I’ to a form of drag: ‘the emotions are real, but the speaker is a character, almost like being in drag, where the performance embodies a heightened version of femininity and life in general.’ That’s pretty much been my approach to the ‘I’ since I read it. It’s all drag. How do you feel when someone assumes that the ‘I’ in your poems is you?
IW: Poetry to me is very therapeutic. It enables me to know what I think. Without poetry, I wouldn’t know what I think, what I care about, what I’m dreaming of. It’s like having a good conversation with someone who knows me really well. When I read Girl, Swooning, I’m like, Wow, I think that too! I wrote it, but I’m also friends with the speaker.
ES: There’s this brilliant poet called Dunya Mikhail and she says: ‘poetry isn’t medicine. It’s an X-ray.’ I think about that a lot. I think it’s just a whole exercise in knowing, really, a lot of the time.
IW: Yeah, and I think it’s so far from being narcissistic, so far from being self-absorbed, because we are part of the world, right? Our minds, our selves, our hearts, our lives, our bodies – this is the section of the created world we are destined, or doomed if you are pessimistic, to know most intimately. I think poetry is a way to see oneself. To open one’s eyes, to X-ray oneself.
ES: I think Bitch likes the idea that she’s presenting herself as self-absorbed. I don’t think that’s who Bitch is – and I do mean Bitch, I don’t mean myself – but that’s how she wants to present herself. That’s how she wants people to perceive her.
IW: I think, also, in Girl, it’s an intentional introversion.
ES: I think they are two sides of the same coin, really. And I’m so glad that they’ve met.
IW: They’re hanging out.
ES: That’s quite a pretty way to end, actually.
Ellora Sutton is a poet and PhD candidate based in Hampshire. Her work has been published in The Poetry Review, Magma, Berlin Lit, Propel, etc. She is the poetry reviewer for Mslexia. She was the Poetry Book Society’s Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice with Antonyms for Burial (Fourteen Poems).
Imogen Wade is a writer and mental health practitioner. She won the National Poetry Competition 2023 and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2024. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The London Magazine, Perverse, Poetry Wales, and Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets.
