Lucy Dixcart’s impressive debut pamphlet, Faint, covers a range of issues such as motherhood, student life, identity and unrequited love. However what intrigued me most was the originality and the force with which she conveyed her insights into gender power relationships

In the fine poem, Ballroom Dancing for Introverts, these relationships between men and women are aptly symbolised through a ballroom dance. The man leads, he is given control: ‘he steers’ her. Her role is to do as she is told: ‘As commanded, I recline my head in rapture’. There is nothing innate or natural about these roles: they are roles they have been ‘cast’, yet the role for the woman is a distinctly inferior one. She is merely ‘dressing’ and ornament, whilst the male’s role is conveyed through the beautifully apt and inventive image, ‘a wrangler of women’, which conjures up associations of male vitality and control. Significantly…