If you're sexy and you know it slap your hams is a darkly funny, irreverently angry, and stupidly erotic contemplation of what it means to be a person, especially a sexy person, especially a sexy fat person, with supple, slappable hams.

This is a good book for bad people, no judgement. A good book of poems for people who like a procession of dogs’ dicks, bodily fluids, naked old ladies, groundhogs, asses, nose picking, depression and bisexual innuendo. A poetry collection like nothing else but actually like a lot of other things. Pushing the sad into the funny and back into the sad again, this book provides a portrait of a young human coping with a cruel and indifferent universe, love, life, mental illness, celebrity culture; and smizing all the way down. This poetry collection is a fat wet tongue writhing with pleasure and agony in the mouth of a culture overflowing with bad behaviour, worse intentions and even worse, smellier saliva. This book is like chicken soup for the soul, except someone misheard and they used chicken poop instead. And now they have chicken poop instead of a soul. Eloise Grills tears her time-space continuum a new one, slapping our sumptuous hams over and over; so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the arse.

💥 Shortlisted for the 2020 Mary Gilmore Award, the judges wrote:

‘Eloise Grill’s If you're sexy and you know it slap your hams is an irreverent and funny/sad/angry textual performance tracking through the cruel or simply ridiculous complications of modern life – sex, mental illness, daily drudge, body image, social media feels. Grills mines the cultural moment including its pop cultural artefacts and its waste products (and bad smells) with avidity, even disgust, as the banal collides with more complex emotions. The book challenges readers to laugh as well as cry (or both) along with it, while asking some unsettling questions, of the world, of bodies, and one’s own self-image. The book is, by turn, parodic, anxious, celebratory, and self-mocking, while still gesturing to an idea of, if not lyric transcendence, then a celebration of brief revelatory moments amongst this century’s live and virtual detritus, its everyday glitches, bad moods and dark pleasures.’

Praise for If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams:

‘What Sally Rooney would write if she wrote for fun. From an ode to the old women changing in swimming pool shower blocks, to a list of celebrities who own islands for self-care, to her own version of Alanis Morrisesette's "not literally ironic but inconvenient, f****d, or borderline cruel" iconic song, Eloise Grills is crazy-talented, darkly funny and, obviously, very sexy. If you loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, try this one by Eloise Grills.’

-Emma Co (Bookseller, Better Read Than Dead)

First edition. Perfect bound. 114 pages.

ISBN: 9780648147589

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