When a new relationship casts her in the unforeseen role of stepmother, prizewinning poet Helen Mort embarks on a personal quest to understand this most maligned of female archetypes. 'She already has a mum. To speak would have seemed like a disavowal, a distancing. To stay silent meant taking something which was not yours. So of course you said nothing. You took it.'

With compelling candour and emotional insight, these poems are unforgettable dispatches from the shifting terrain that is the modern family. Alongside the poet’s own journey, Stepmother revisits with a fresh and questioning eye stepmothers in fairytale, film, and our culture’s darkest corners of fantasy.

Mort’s writing interweaves ravishing fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, powerfully, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, Stepmother has much to teach us about female power and its perennial threat; about our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take.