Melissa Lee-Houghton

Sunshine

Melissa Lee Houghton's A Body Made of You is a series of poems written for other writers, artists, strangers, lovers and friends. The process began by interviewing each muse, and then working from photographs and in a couple of cases, paintings of them or by them. Charged with sexuality and an uncomfortable sense of the strange, this debut collection introduces a powerful new voice in poetry.

A Body Made of You

Alice Oswald

Ian Duhig

Vahni Capildeo

Forward Various

Forward Book of Poetry 2017

In The Faithful Look Away, the acclaimed poet Melissa Lee-Houghton brings her full imaginative force to bear on a short fiction with all the hallmarks of her singular talent. Exploring domestic pressures, mental health, addiction and issues surrounding body image with a caustic wit, an almost physical delight in description and a wellspring of empathy, this story is yet another marker laid down by one of the most exciting authors currently writing in English.

The Faithful Look Away

DescriptionFollowing her debut book, 'Patterns of Mourning' Melissa Lee-Houghton has written a new collection of original, raw-edged poems that are concerned with all things both abject and sublime. Love meets violence, death meets clarity; the theme of sex dominates many of the poems as for the writer, it always brings about the question of domination and submission, of the will, if not the senses. She writes to try to find answers as to how we are to love; and if we can maintain loving relationships after abuse has happened. Early recollections and experiences find powerful resonance now that the writer is in her mid-twenties, and the newness of family life and marital love have given her the space to understand herself and her addiction to writing. Many of these poems were composed during periods of 'illness' as Melissa's Bipolar symptoms have worsened over the years. She has also been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder; and the intense, confessional, blunt and argumentative tone in her work is her way of expressing her personality and her identity outside of medicine and psychiatry, outside of stereotypes and stigma. About the AuthorMelissa Lee-Houghton was born in Wythenshawe 1982 to a young mother whose unstable relationship with her husband caused the family to uproot. Melissa has no recollection of her father. She enjoyed a childhood made magical in its promise and naivety but the happiness was equally matched by disturbing and abusive experiences. By the age of 11, Melissa had seen a psychiatrist as she would no longer attend school and had begun a severe depression which lasted the duration of her school years and made it impossible for her to attend. Instead, she was treated and admitted to psychiatric services for anxiety, depression and self-harm, and the makings of what turned out to be full-blown Bipolar Affective moodswings and psychosis. She feels her illness is an enduring trauma with which she chronically battles with medications. Writing, to her, is necessity. Melissa has two children, and suffered PNI and Puerperal Psychosis following their births. Melissa's debut book, Patterns of Mourning is available through Chipmunka. Melissa is currently working on a new project focussing on composing literary 'portraits' of some wonderfully diverse people from all walks of life.

Bite Your Tongue When You Give Me My Name

Description Following her debut book, 'Patterns of Mourning' Melissa Lee-Houghton has written a new collection of original, raw-edged poems that are concerned with all things both abject and sublime. Love meets violence, death meets clarity; the theme of sex dominates many of the poems as for the writer, it always brings about the question of domination and submission, of the will, if not the senses. She writes to try to find answers as to how we are to love; and if we can maintain loving relationships after abuse has happened. Early recollections and experiences find powerful resonance now that the writer is in her mid-twenties, and the newness of family life and marital love have given her the space to understand herself and her addiction to writing. Many of these poems were composed during periods of 'illness' as Melissa's Bipolar symptoms have worsened over the years. She has also been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder; and the intense, confessional, blunt and argumentative tone in her work is her way of expressing her personality and her identity outside of medicine and psychiatry, outside of stereotypes and stigma.

Poems and Other Prose Writings

DescriptionPatterns of Mourning began after a tragic bereavement and takes the course of a damaging love-affair in which the narrator becomes increasingly unstable and detached from reality. Written by a young mother coming-of-age, suffering the trauma of a severe Manic-Depressive Episode, this vivid account of grief, loneliness and love is a sprawling, relentless confessional poem, composed by pastiche of deconstructed emails, letters and delineated manic, longhand prose. Written over the course of the narrator's breakdown and whilst in psychiatric care, nightmares both lived and imagined conjure obsessive hallucinatory manifestations to form an ecstatic and melancholic diary of all the inner processes of one going mad, alone. About the AuthorMelissa Lee-Houghton is a Northern writer of poetry and prose. She is currently working on her first full collection of poems and writes for The Short Review. Born in 1982 in Wythenshawe, Manchester, she has lived in Lancashire all her adult life after uprooting due to family breakdown. Taken out of school at 13 to attend a child psychiatric unit, it became obvious to those around her that she was intense and troubled, and episodes of self-harm during severe anxiety and depression led to her being admitted and assessed in psychiatric care, aged 14. Diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder at 15, Melissa has suffered numerous episodes which resulted in severe personal trauma and a chronic battle with medications. She suffered post-natal depression as a single teenage parent, and experienced harrowing puerperal psychosis after the birth of her second child, in 2006.

Patterns of Mourning

'Beautiful Girls' 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 'the sky and the planets' reserved for those with personality disorders. The book will be a home-from-home for sufferers and a journey through a terrible night for those who've been fortunate enough to take the non-scenic route in life.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

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