Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing
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Mirror mirror: the ‘reverso’ poem in Kim Moore’s ‘All the Men I Never Married’
All night a bird beats its wingsbehind the wall. In the space between roomsit has the quietest scream. (I realise I cannot livewithout desire.) At first I think it’s trappedbehind the wall. Is it another birdthat moves, that seems to fall and rise again?I am hiding somethingin the mirror. In the morningI am searching for…
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Archiving grief: Patricia Lockwood’s ‘No One Is Talking About This’
Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (Bloomsbury, 2021) won last year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, and was cited especially for its depiction of the Internet. In the book, the ‘portal’ is a virtual world that can provide access to ‘everywhere’, but is a largely desensitised space; it is where the protagonist spends…
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‘speech language voice’: ‘Diego Garcia’ by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams
In this form-breaking novel, Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams wowed judges of the Goldsmiths Prize by co-authoring a story of companionship and collectivity, even during pandemic lockdowns. But they also related the recent colonial history of the Chagossian people and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia: the forced evacuation of native peoples by the…
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Dancing the night away: Joelle Taylor’s ‘C+nto & Othered Poems’
Joelle Taylor’s C+nto & Othered Poems (The Westbourne Press, 2021) won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize. It offers a searing history of butch culture in the 1980s and after, with both tragedy, epiphany, and liberation tracking across its 121 pages. It is a collection that stores tragedy at its core, especially in the magisterial scene…
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Bastardising epic: Shehan Karunatilaka’s ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022) won last year’s Booker Prize for its ‘energy, imagery and ideas [set] against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars’. We find that ‘surreal vision’ in its depiction of the afterlife—both the In Between (a version of purgatory), and the…
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Seeing is remembering: the photograph in Annie Ernaux’s ‘The Years’
Annie Ernaux is the latest name to grace the list of Nobel Prize winners in Literature. She was awarded in 2022 for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. Nobel Prize awarding committee The sense of ‘clinical acuity’ combined with the richness of ‘personal…
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