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Britney Spears receives literary praise

Britney Spears launched her new poetry collection 'Britney, Britney, 1 more time' in the US last week, and is now preparing for a UK press tour next month. As always with Spears, fans and paparazzis alike are keen to keep an eye on her, but keeping the book a secret was not a big problem – whenever news were leaked online, the audience simply refused to believe it. The book is, however, very real. The 40 poems all bear the same titles as some of her most popular songs, and can be seen as her own re-writings of how she would have liked the songs to sound. ”I've always written lyrics, but my producers told me they didn't suit the market. As I've matured and been through a lot in my life, I found that the lyrics started to turn into poems, and many of them responses to the songs I was singing – my songs, but not my own.”, Spears writes in the press release.

The name of the collection is a play on 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', one of her first big hits: ”I chose that title partly because it follows the same iambic meter as the original title of the song – I am a musician at heart, and I am still obsessed with rhythm. But it also reflects how I've felt during a large part of my career, I've always been pushed forward, and always had to do just another song, just another interview, just another silly thing to get me in the newspapers. These are themes that are very present in the collection, and I feel the title shows this well.”

While one might expect some difficulties for someone like Britney trying to break into a scene that is highly dominated by old men and academics, critics have been quite ecstatic to read the new collection. The Guardian's own reviewer Mister Nobody suggests this might be because poetry traditionally deals with high culture before pop culture – largely because poets tend to be rather old when they're recognised, and have stopped watching X-Factor due to a loss of sight or hearing. Britney has made a name for herself outside of literature, and this gives her the chance to publish a collection like this when she's still relatively young. She is opening the eyes of critics to see that good, experimental poetry can be written by younger people.

Britney finishes telling us she's ”finally feeling ready to be a back on stage – more excited than ever, even though the stages this time will be much smaller. Come down and have a poem and an autograph” - if you are interested, dates of the UK tour can be found on waterstones.co.uk.

'Britney, Britney, 1 more time – poems from a popstar' 
61 pages. Faber&Faber.
Comes out today, and can be found across the country at booksellers or online at amazon, for £7.99.

”Feels influenced by equal amounts of Byron and Tao Lin – but most of all original” - The Observer

”Dark, surreal and insanely funny. 'Toxic' left me in tears” - BBC Books

”A collection full of energy to take on life, but it never succumbs to cliché. Already a favorite for the Forward Prize here at the office” - The Poetry Review