SuAndi, "Leaning Against Time"

SuAndi, photo by Julian Kronfli

SuAndi is an Honorary Creative Writing Fellow in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. She is a writer, poet and arts practitioner born and raised in Manchester. She is the recipient of an OBE, a Doctor of Arts from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Doctor of Letters degree from Lancaster University. Her awards include the Windrush Inspirational Award, Winston Churchill Fellowship, Hope & Inspiration Award for Work Supporting Black History Month, NESTA Dream Time Fellowship, Big Issue in the North Individual Inspirational Award and the MBMEN Lifetime Award. In 2023 SuAndi was the recipient, in her hometown, of the Manchester Culture Special Recognition Award. In 2024 SuAndi was named an Honorary Fellow as well as awarded the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, in recognition of "conspicuous service to literature."

About Leaning Against Time, by SuAndi

Leaning Against Time is the first substantial selection of poems by SuAndi, whose work – as performer, writer for stage and arts curator – has recently been celebrated by the award of the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is an honorary fellow, for services to literature across her career. The prize recognised her poems’ fierce, vividly powerful and dramatic depictions of women’s lives – in Manchester, the city she grew up in – and of Black communities and the lives of those whose voices are not often heard, even now, in contemporary British literature. In this selection, the rhythms of speech and performance echo off the page. Though she is as at home with the dramatic monologue as the lyric and the ballad, SuAndi’s poems defy easy categorisation and make visible on the page a remarkable trailblazing writing career.

You can read more about Leaning Against Time on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Leaning Against Time

Toast

She offered me toast with my tea
Not cake or biscuits
Maybe because of the hour of the day
Brewed the right way
Like my mother’s teapot
warmed first
Old ways seem odd today
Toast in three minutes
always golden
No aroma
to tempt the appetite
Cookers with grills
foil wrapped to save bacon fat
No bending backache with eyelevel vision
central heating modernised away what once was to no longer
It’s not the same
as when
One fork too heavy for the table
slightly bent by the heat
of a grate red hot with coals
browned fingers
often burnt toast
It made no difference
when laden with fridge rock hard butter
Smells of the old are different to the new
I sipped my tea and declined the marmalade

Ordinary Woman

I am an ordinary woman
Nothing special
Ordinary. Nothing. Nothing. Ordinary.
There is nothing to show
Nothing to tell
Ordinary. Nothing. Ordinary.
I have cut my hair, grown it
Cut it again. Permed it, straightened it, left it natural
Ordinary. Natural. Naturally ordinary.

I have raised children, alone
Born many, lost a few
Terminated one for my survival, sanity.
Paid the price. Murderer. Nothing. Ordinary.

Will you tell of me?
Remember me in history?
I am not a feminist made no stands
Nor have I been the discarded
Pleasure of a man.
I have loved and left. Loved and lost.
Ordinary. No different. Ordinary.

Yet without me there is no tomorrow:
No more generations;
Without me the world cannot last
From my loins – I have borne life,
Ordinary children

Grinded by a man, ordinary just like me.

Do not forget we who have fought battles
Lost and won wars
Worked hard in labour
Settled no scores;
You may go down in history,
We will simply die.
Ordinary. Nothing.
Ordinary in life. Ordinary in death. Ordinarily special.
This woman me, that man he
Please, never forget the ordinary people.