Museum of Ice Cream

By Jenna Clake

Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes, and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying: public and private jars of peanut butter, a tray of lemons, unfurling chocolate bar wrappers. In turning to television, childhood films, and social media accounts, her collection investigates how to reveal and conceal, what it means to have a secret, to be intimate, to navigate something that should be natural, but feels sickly, sour, and wrong. Museum of Ice Cream is Jenna Clake’s second collection, following her debut Fortune Cookie (2017), winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, which was also shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Apr 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781780375465

Book preview

Cover: Museum of Ice Cream by Jenna Clake

JENNA CLAKE

MUSEUM OF ICE CREAM

Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream is part simulation, part internal monologue, part attempt to reach out. An uncanny examination of objects, scenes, and flavours, these poems explore how food can connect and divide, can feel isolating and terrifying: public and private jars of peanut butter, a tray of lemons, unfurling chocolate bar wrappers. In turning to television, childhood films, and social media accounts, her collection investigates how to reveal and conceal, what it means to have a secret, to be intimate, to navigate something that should be natural, but feels sickly, sour, and wrong.

Museum of Ice Cream is Jenna Clake’s second collection, following her debut Fortune Cookie (2017), winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize, which was also shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award.

‘The trajectory between Clake’s debut collection and Museum of Ice Cream is logical but still beautifully unexpected: the linguistic precision and surreal swerves are stronger than ever, but something deepens and resonates as the voice transitions from instructive, to consoling, to lost, often within the same stanza. These are poems of such sadness and grace; fear transfigured by a powerful imagination into endlessly explorable terrains. Not so much to guide as to reach out to you in your own maze of confusion, wonder and dread; which is all I ever really ask of poetry.’ – Luke Kennard

Cover photograph: Charles on Unsplash

JENNA CLAKE

Museum of Ice Cream

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to the editors of the publications in which some of these poems, or earlier versions, appeared: The Poetry Review, The White Review, The Rialto, Oxford Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, Minola Review, Magma, Bath Magg, The Valley Press Anthology of British Prose Poetry, Islands Are But Mountains: New poetry from the United Kingdom.

‘Tell me if you prefer your carrots as sticks or coins and I’ll always remember’ was highly commended in the University of Hertfordshire Single Poem Prize. ‘I try to make sense of things by standing very close to windows’ was placed second in the Newcastle Poetry Competition. ‘Wooden doll, total being’ won the BareFiction poetry prize. Thank you to the judges.

With love and thanks to: my family, Luke, Izzy, Cynthia,