What the Water Gave Me

Pascale Petit trained at the Royal College of Art and spent the first part of her life as an artist, before deciding to concentrate on poetry. Since then she has published five collections, two of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and featured as Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and the Independent. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected her as one of the Next Generation Poets. She teaches poetry writing courses for a number of organisations, including Tate Modern. Petit has read her work at many festivals around the world and travelled to Mexico several times to research Kahlo’s life.

'Their apparent shared sensibility makes the ventriloquism of these poems entirely unforced, and while Kahlo's voice is subtly distinguished from Petit's own, both women have a way of taking painful, private experiences and transmuting them, through imagery, into something that has the power of folklore. They capture the unsettling spirit of Frida Kahlo and her work perfectly.' Poetry London 'No other British poet I am aware of can match the powerful mythic imagination of Pascale Petit.' Les Murray Times Literary Supplement