“I’ve always been interested in the voice as part of the body,” Hannah Silva tells Julian Cowley in The Wire 386. “So when I was studying choreography I might ask a dancer doing a very physical routine to speak at the same time, to see how the effort impacted the voice.”

Silva is a Birmingham based poet, playwright and performer known for her exploration of voice and language. Her work explores a wide range of subjects, from politics in her 2011 solo show Opposition to teenage identity in 2013's Orchid. Silva also works within the field of sound poetry, describing her work Prosthetics as “a kind of tweet poem, just a few sentences on the page, but in performance, using a loop pedal to build layers, it can be five minutes long”. Her current piece Schlock! is performed using British Sign Language, soundscapes and poetry. For this meditation on pain, the body and the self, she extracted sections of Fifty Shades Of Grey and combining it with the works of the late Kathy Acker.

Hannah Silva will be performing at the International Poetry Festival, Bucharest, which runs from 20–22 May. She will perform Schlock! in London this autumn. You can read Julian Cowley's feature about the artist in The Wire 386. Subscribers can access that via our online archive.

“The Riverbank” is exclusive to The Wire. It was constructed from a selection of existing poems.