Escape Room

Escape Room embroiders the misadventures and surrealism of an ingenue’s clear-eyed wonder and cynicism in graduating high school, job interviews, work-life, atheism and character portraits that are far from caricature.This is a collection exploring the possibilities of freedom, goodness, meaning and connection under late capitalism. Can we escape the imperatives of money, gender and human fallibility to freely construct our own identities – should we even try?This complexity is balanced with a resolute joy and humour. Littlefair’s poems are a delectable serving of postmodern irony, a contemporary Betjemanesque indictment on suburban, middle-class life, wryly observed with a razor-sharp wit, executed with warmth, honesty and precision that make this an irresistible and perspicacious collection.Escape Room kickstarts with ‘After Graduating’ a reflection on Littlefair’s post-collegiate job as a cupcake baker, where “time is the finest sieve”. ‘First Job’ chronicles her magazine-flicking, shower gel shelf-filling, part-time squandering in Boots, and then a selection of prose poems highlight the Monty Pythoneque absurdism of middle management micromanagement. This is delightfully exemplified in the ‘other kitchen’, where your mug choice is tantamount to a career move, the dashed ambitions of ‘The assistant’, the tupperware politics of the communal fridge in ‘Lunch hour’ and the corporate bonding exercise that is the collection’s self-titled ‘Escape Room’. All of which underline the malcontent of our initial meanderings in the land of work and those who have remained festered in the malaise of job dis-satisfaction.Littlefair’s vocational forays then take us into woefully familiar character portraits, such as the ‘Friend’, who is brimming with entrepreneurial ideas that never come to fruition, while Littlefair remains the loyal, indulgent yet mournful friend.We have mugshots of school bullies and frenemies in ‘Tara Miller’ and ‘Self portrait at a high school graduation ceremony’; the anti- lovechild of High School Musical and the Breakfast Club, with the signature Claudia who is as “rich and sleek as a greyhound” with her “all-purpose viciousness”, but counterbalanced by the acknowledgment of her alcoholic mother and creepy father.‘Sunday mornings’ and ‘Swallow’ represent the lapsed Christian’s confessional, whereas the absurdist afterlife is considered in ‘Heaven doesn’t have skirting boards’.We also have glimpses of the metapoet where ‘In this poem you are in danger’ ,‘I realised my life was the subplot’, as well as conversations with therapists in ‘Room’, ‘Fruits’ and ‘Some Therapists’Escape Room is the poetical equivalent of kitchen sink drama meets The Office and the Mighty Boosh. Absurdist, ironic, surreal yet rooted in AstroTurf reality, where the mundanities of everyday life of “eggs dreaming in their boxes” are escalated to a stranger hugging you at the cash till, mistaking you for their child.

“'Through the use of deadpan humour, lightning wit and a commitment to poking fun at pomposity, Bryony Littlefair's poems show us what the world is really like. Her similes are compellingly outrageous and her metaphors are gloriously bizarre - these poems let us see life and our lives as the ridiculous strange beautiful creatures they are'. --Kim Moore”

"Fresh, natural and surprising twists and turns, sudden illuminations that feel like truth telling” – Pascal Petit. “Through the use of deadpan humour, lightning wit and a commitment to poking fun at pomposity, Bryony Littlefair’s poems show us what the world is really like. Her similes are compellingly outrageous and her metaphors are gloriously bizarre – these poems let us see life and our lives as the ridiculous strange beautiful creatures they are.” – Kim Moore.

Bryony Littlefair is a poet, community centre worker and workshop facilitator born in Watford, currently based in London. After studying English Literature and Philosophy at the University of York, she began pursuing writing seriously in 2015 when she discovered the contemporary poetry landscape on the internet, particularly the American lyric poets. She developed her craft through attending classes at the Poetry School and regularly visiting the Poetry Library.Her poems have since appeared in magazines including Rialto, Ambit, Magma and The Moth and have been anthologised in various collections. Her pamphlet Giraffe (Seren) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize in 2017. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and 2020 and in 2019 received the Moth Retreat Bursary Award. She is a member of the UniSlam post-emerging cohort for mid-career poets. Her forthcoming collection Escape Room (Seren, 2022), was funded by a Arts Council England project grant.She has had various jobs including cupcake baker, dementia support worker, and Project Coordinator for The Reader Organisation, setting up Shared Reading groups for people aged 75+ in Croydon. She currently works at a community centre in Kilburn and teaches Creative Writing for Camden Adult Learning, alongside facilitating poetry workshops freelance for Create and other charitable organisations. She is particularly interested in the intersection between poetry and mental health/illness, and is studying for a Foundation Certificate in Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regents University.Bryony’s debut collection Escape Room was funded by a Arts Council England project grant and is forthcoming in October 2022.

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