{"title":"Claudine Toutoungi","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the poignant and beautifully written works of Claudine Toutoungi. Delve into themes of identity, belonging, and family secrets. Perfect for readers who enjoy character-driven narratives.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"smoothie-book-claudine-toutoungi-9781784104122","title":"Smoothie","description":"Smoothie is Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection of poems. It takes a tender, exuberant and deliciously dark look at our desire to be heard, whatever the cost; a desire that can be treacherous, comical and sometimes – often enough to fend off despair – fulfilled. Smoothie plots the wayward wanderings of a beguiling cast of misfits – hotel eavesdroppers, city interlopers, lone wolves, phantom bird-watchers, disaffected language robots and triumphant piano-swallowers – as they try to express themselves. The poems are candid without being confessional: the poet’s `I’ encompasses the reader. Language’s smooth surface bubbles up as Toutoungi’s characters reveal their peculiarly twenty-first-century disorientations, riffing off loneliness, authenticity and heartbreak as they go.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49636512399633,"sku":"GOR008739092","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50733910786321,"sku":"GOR009050417","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1784104124.jpg?v=1756707854"},{"product_id":"two-tongues-book-claudine-toutoungi-9781800170001","title":"Two Tongues","description":"Winner of the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021                                  Slip-ups, skirmishes and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion - spatial, verbal and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739567464721,"sku":"NGR9781800170001","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49768473461009,"sku":"GOR011651082","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1800170009.jpg?v=1756707868"},{"product_id":"emotional-support-horse-book-claudine-toutoungi-9781800174474","title":"Emotional Support Horse","description":"Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2025  A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year 2024   Emotional Support Horse tracks the tragicomedy of grief, and  out of low vision, bereavement and eco-stress blends poems of startling  wit, verve and solace. A woman longs to transform into Nicola Walker in  a cop car, or a Hungarian Vizsla, or just to find an equal footing with  her doctor. Personal and planetary fractures blur in these vivid,  dreamlike pages that will speak to anyone who has faced down confusion  and rupture, when they strike. In part soulful, in part self-help, the  poems veer between droll and despairing, their swings from high to low  and back again reflecting a self adrift on a choppy sea. A self,  however, not alone, but accompanied throughout by a host of other  species. From earthworms to wolfhounds, flamingos to Konic ponies, the  world of Emotional Support Horse flickers with light and life, charting sorrow's depths even as it stumbles upon joy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50822011289873,"sku":"GOR014086099","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51300605264145,"sku":"NIN9781800174474","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52109777010961,"sku":"GOR013995411","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52111191802129,"sku":"NGR9781800174474","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1800174470.jpg?v=1756707899"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-claudine-toutoungi.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}