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About Tamar
Welcome to the website of poet Tamar Yoseloff.

Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US in 1965. Since moving to London in 1987, she has been the organiser of the Terrible Beauty reading series at the Troubadour Coffee House, Reviews Editor of Poetry London magazine, and from 2000 to 2007, Programme Coordinator for The Poetry School. Tamar Yoseloff She currently works as a freelance tutor in creative writing.

A pamphlet collection (Fun House, Slow Dancer Press, 1994) was followed by her first full collection, Sweetheart (Slow Dancer Press, 1998), which was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the winner of the Aldeburgh Festival Prize. She received a New Writers' Award from London Arts (now Arts Council England, London) for a manuscript in progress, which was eventually published as her second collection, Barnard’s Star (Enitharmon Press, 2004) Her most recent book, Fetch, was published by Salt in April 2007, as well as a collaborative book with the artist Linda Karshan, published by Pratt Contemporary Art. She was the editor of A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (Salt, 2007) and the Poetry Editor of Art World magazine from 2007-2009. Her upcoming collection with Salt, The City with Horns, will feature a sequence of poems inspired by the life and work of the American abstract artist, Jackson Pollock.

She holds a MPhil in Writing from the University of Glamorgan, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University. She teaches for a number of institutions, including Birkbeck, Spread the Word and the Poetry School. In 2005 she was Writer in Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as part of their Year in Literature Festival. She divides her time between London and Suffolk, and has recently completed her first novel.

Her writing encompasses a wide range of ideas and subjects, but she is particularly interested in the relationship between poetry and visual art, specifically contemporary art. She has run a number of site-specific writing workshops which are concerned with poetry and place.

To contact Tamar, please email her at: info@tamaryoseloff.com

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Excerpts

Each night I'd drag the textbook to my room,
stare at diagrams of musculature until my mother
said goodnight, then by flashlight I'd find
my dog-eared Havelock Ellis, real life stories
of every kind of fetish: shoe sniffing, grown men

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How could words express this world, reeling
out of reach-
a place you don’t exist where I have seen
The Nolans, leaving

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What mattered was matter, the precise
weight of you, so many ounces
of flesh and blood,

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