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All spring, Lisa, you’ve been picking
at the scabs
of the one thing that went right
in your life. All summer
I’ve been watching your calves as they meet
the backs of your knees that you give me to smooth
with cool Noxzema cream from that
blue expired jar.
By Nicholas Rombes.
6.4 My leader spread his hand, took up earth, and with full fists threw it into the ravenous gullets, setting our feet on their emptiness, which seemed real bodies, profane wretches turning themselves to ensure pedestrians are kept away from trucks and lorries. All equipment must comply with the EC Directives set out in BS 5228. The straight way is lost, but concierge services are your ally to help navigate life in the world’s most exciting city, carpet to wall, bespoke drawer set, mirrored vanity unit, cinema room, the baseless fabric of this vision are indicative only and are melted into air, into thin air.
Read Tom McCarthy‘s contribution to the Denizen of the Dead anthology, edited by Stewart Home.
Then there is the power of the human voice. I’ve noticed that on repeated listening to various podcasts I’ve got very used to the way voices carry through the air and the earphones. I avoid certain types of voices because my ears do not receive them well. It is often not what is being said, but how—the pitch and timbre, the cadence and the general attitude of the speaking voice. I tend to listen to voices that are mildly soothing but also abrasive, and to podcasts that are generally adversarial, that seem to have a lot at stake in challenging the injustices of ‘the system’ whatever that nebulous term means. The podcaster ‘friend’ voice is a thing onto itself. It is soft, deliberate, warm, without any pretense toward sarcasm or authority. It is in fact the very opposite of authority, the kind of voice we associate with the ‘father’ tone of old world news anchors and interviewers Edward R. Murrow, Dan Rather or Charlie Rose.
By Tom Pazderka.
The Appointment is written in the form of a monologue: one woman vents her emotions to a silent doctor in what will turn out to be a life-changing medical appointment. Her narration ranges from wilful provocation to pensive eloquence, often in the space of a single sentence. This conflictual style, which allows for musings about people ‘who are sometimes admitted to hospital with half their living room up their ass’ to lead to the quite profound observation, ‘that’s what loneliness does to people, Dr Seligman; they forget how to articulate their ideas’, fully justifies those more provocative lines. Thanks to this brave authorial decision, the hypocrisy of modern British prudishness is displayed to the reader with unrelenting candour.
Charlie Stone reviews Katharina Volckmer‘s The Appointment.
I knew that my guest had seen. Why, she said. But there is no Why when you can see down the beam and into the colours of being. Once they have seen the lights converge the Why will dissolve into nothing.
A short story by David Hering.
Reading Perec’s collection of essays Species of Space broke me out of the impasse I had found myself in. I packed up my haunted river book, accepted it as lost and melodramatically threw it off a pier into the sea, and I began again; this time writing an entirely new book about the past where terrible, wondrous and everyday stories would be told via the conduit of objects, thus bypassing the perils of direct disclosure. Written in a month-long bloodshot frenzy, after three or four years of involuntary suspended animation, Inventory was guided by restrictions as well as the friendly ghost of Perec. The idea was to treat it not as a book but instead a collection that I was merely assembling from the hoards of junk in the attic of memory.
Darran Anderson on how Georges Perec inspired his new book, Inventory.
These typewritten poems were initially conceived of as a joke (at the expense of the 20th century?) and should probably be considered as such.
They, unadvisedly, wilfully inherit from the theories of Jiří Kolář and Group 42, though to their credit possess little in the way of Habsburgian nostalgia.
Repeatedly hitting the same key on a typewriter over and over is surprisingly dissatisfying as a means of ‘writing’, and in fact starts to hurt, so the author would not recommend it.
In the 105th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ben Britton.
Out of immense archival research and a prodigious control of language, Hester patiently assembles what amounts to be a cosmography of the fifty-year career of the multimedia artist and author. Though remarkably ambitious in scope and conducted with vigor, Hester’s large-scale arch unfolds with a surprising elegance that relationally considers Dennis Cooper’s work simultaneously as an oeuvre and as discrete, individual pieces. Hester goes further, and where I believe he undoubtedly succeeds is his positioning of Cooper’s work against historical backdrops of aesthetic, political, and critical theories.
Evan Isoline reviews Diarmuid Hester‘s Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper.
Ahead of us the spine of a desiccated leviathan, the freeway curved and plunged into pelvic convolutions. Pleased by this easy drive, by the hypnotism of the journey, a kaleidoscopic landscape activated by speed and made rhythmic by road signs, I nonetheless allowed a small part of my mind to wonder where our pilot, the rabbit, might be aiming. Puzzled more than concerned, I again sat up so as to scrutinize my co-passenger and our driver.
A short story by Nick Norton.
I am quilting a Grandma’s Flower Garden out of:
Tight fits. Things that just didn’t sit right. That I didn’t know what to do with (rather than call the boss I stashed it). Impulse buys from the market. Gifted fabrics and excesses. Dye tryouts. With paint stains. Some see-through. Ripped robes.
After I finish working, there are still things left over.
In the 104th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Eeva Rönkä.