‘Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks offer the reader poems of finely wrought beauty that contain a hitherto silenced personal history. Belltree joins the tradition of women writers who challenge the parental command and defy the scar upon the tongue in order to speak out with eloquence and exemplary strength of mind’ – Helen May Williams

This book explores fractured connections of self, family and home, laying bare the devastating impact of traumatisation against language and identity in its unflinching quest to communicate the brittle reality of everyday life at the edge. The destructive forces of suicide, insomnia, self-harm and abuse are given order through the creative drive of poetic forms. At the heart of this collection are a daughter’s fraught relationships with her half Japanese father, who survived three years as a POW in Czechoslovakia, and a mother who grew up in National Socialist Germany, and whose unspoken traumas haunted the fabric of family life.