Threadbare

Threadbare is about witnessing and experiencing sexual violence against women from a young age, and how, despite unravelling, we manage, time and time again, to stitch ourselves back together. This pamphlet is a crucial contribution to the ongoing conversation about sexual violence and the nature of victimhood brought into the limelight by the #MeToo movement.

The collection is broken into two parts – each beautifully demarcated with hand-drawn illustrations from the author. Part I sees the speaker witness sexual violence against women from a young age, and constitutes an extended falling:

When I fell, the trees and houses were geometric shapes and I didn’t hit the ground, I tore through it. (from ‘When I walked out’)

Part II explores with the utmost nuance and subtlety the relationship between sexual consent and emotional abuse. Yet this collection is ultimately uplifting, a reclamation and catharsis, a triumph of familial love:

She says, without turning, ‘You’re the women who survived.’ Her hair is caught, not by the wind, but by the fireflies.

They puppeteer and pull at it, like stars to the stark grey moon. Before we forward march, she stands: ‘I think I’ll be leaving soon.

‘Thank the ones who believe your words and love you back to life. Listen to the blackbirds. Build a house for the blackbird’s wife.’

Our tears flow into the lake, growing underwater forests. ‘Tomorrow, it’ll be sunny,’ she says. ‘And that, I can promise.’ (from ‘For my sister’)

Author Biography

Abbie Neale is an English writer and painter, with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Warwick University. She has lived in Australia and the Netherlands, but is now comfortably settled back home in the UK. Her poetry has appeared in The North, Strix Magazine and Whirlagust, an anthology by Yaffle Press, and in 2019 she won the International Prize in the York Mix Poetry Competition.