Released July 31st, 2025 // 42 pages // 978-1-917617-21-5 // RRP: £10.99 / $14.99 / €13.99
Mary Mulholland’s the elimination game is a candid, sharply observed pamphlet that confronts ageing, mortality, and memory with wit, lyric clarity, and occasional surrealism. Moving between reflective lyric, anecdotal sketches, and formally playful pieces, the poems interrogate the social narratives surrounding older women, the shifting roles within families, and the absurdities of late-life reinvention. Mulholland’s voice is by turns defiant and tender, intimate and ironic, carving out a poetics of resilience that resists sentimentality while embracing emotional complexity.
PRAISE for the elimination game:
Mary’s poems are delicate, introspective meditations on the tensions between our personal, often isolating experiences and the fleeting nature of life itself. With tender precision, she explores familial bonds, friendships, and our daily anxieties and joys, while reminding us of the greater inevitability that we are all, in our own ways, being carried toward a vast unknowable.
— Astrid Alben
I want to praise Mary Mulholland for these necessary poems, deftly interrogating the gaze that is laid upon women as they age. the elimination game does more than value experience, it is a pamphlet that acknowledges important changing shifts in familial relationships, sex, and friendship. The result is an illuminating, fearless study of the rich intricacies of female life.
— Rebecca Goss
If there was ever any doubt that getting older makes you bolder, Mary Mulholland’s the elimination game puts paid to that. This is a gloriously defiant, deliciously witty celebration of womanhood, age and ageing. More Dorothy Parker than Jenny Joseph, these poems are as wise as they are funny, as outrageous as they are true. A complete delight.
— Cheryl Moskowitz
In her second solo-pamphlet, the elimination game, Mulholland explores shadows of the human condition — ageing and mortality — and handles her subject with deft humour and pathos. She offers a slew of new ‘perch-clinging’ euphemisms: ‘a shuffle of wandering fog people … urn-waiting crones.’ as she tries to ‘grey-beard my inner-peace search’, whilst the poem ‘little death’ made me laugh out loud — ‘he’d have died / had he delayed / coming.’ Do read the elimination game whatever your age — ‘a tiny black tear falling from your pupil, / it may help see through dark times’.
— Simon Maddrell
ABOUT Mary Mulholland:
Mary Mulholland’s poems are widely published and regularly mentioned in competitions. Former psychotherapist, with a Newcastle/Poetry School MA in Poetry, she founded the platform Red Door Poets and is an editor of The Alchemy Spoon. She has a pamphlet from Live Canon and two collaborations from Nine Pens with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Occasionally she can be found looking after 300 Barbados Blackbelly sheep in the West Country.
