POEM and a Pint’s mighty midwinter event takes place as usual at Ulverston's Coronation Hall.

This year Cambridge-based poet Joanne Limburg will grace the popular literary gathering in the Coro's supper room on Saturday, February 17 (7.30pm).

Currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalen College, Joanna is much in demand after her 2017 publications, which included her third full poetry collection as well as the more reflective and analytical prose volume, Small Pieces.

She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1998 and her first collection of poetry with Bloodaxe Books: Feminismo, published in 2000 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second, Paraphernalia (2012) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third collection of poems, The Autistic Alice, published early last year, described as a "double study of grief and discomfort," is perhaps her most intimate publication to date.

"I explained that Alice was a vehicle for exploring my own experience, and that I’d been wondering what it would mean to write from the perspective of an autistic subject," Joanne wrote shortly after it was published.

Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger’s, Joanna said she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world, and in the second and longest section of the book, the title section, she frequently uses references to her favourite childhood reading, Martin Gardner’s 1960 Annotated Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. She combines lines and phrases drawn from the book with her own imaginings and explorations creating a disturbingly effective and idiosyncratic language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experience; a text can become a rabbit hole to another world, or a mirror.

The other two sections of the book are shorter, but explore similarly difficult or distressing events. The first section is her response to the death by suicide of her younger brother Julian, a brilliant chemist, to whom she was particularly close. The poems explore memories of their shared childhood as she visits the mid-Western American town where he lived, worked and died.

Joanne's verse is always fresh and exciting and at the same time presents a rawness of experience and feeling that brings the reader and listener closer to the mysteries that lie at the centre of human experience.

Also on the Poem and a Pint bill providing music for the evening will be the Demix - Rod Demick and his wife Sarah Littlefeather, who have been performing as a duo for many years and PP's most requested duo. They need no introduction to aficionados of the Cumbrian music scene.

Floor slots will be performed by the Poem and a Pint committee and holding it altogether as MC will be Ross Baxter.

Pay at the door.