Tag: feminism
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The afterlife in Rachel Cusk’s ‘Parade’
Rachel Cusk’s *Parade* (2024) intertwines stories of a painter named ‘G.’ and various women confronting life’s adversities. The novel’s fragmented structure reflects on themes of identity and gender. It coincidentally parallels Maurice Blanchot’s *The Instant of My Death*. Both works explore ‘death-in-life’—one of Cusk’s narrators grapples with her split self, while Blanchot’s protagonist experiences a…
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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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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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‘Judge for Yourself: Reading Hyper-contemporary literature and book prize shortlists’
‘Judge for Yourself’ is published on 5 October 2020.
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Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 2): the age of consent
In my first blog on Anne Enright’s Actress (Jonathan Cape, 2020), I connected it with the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020) through the search for a female genealogy. Or, in simpler terms, both Norah in Actress and Boland in her prose and poetry are looking for their mothers. In this blog, I again read…
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A stretched tapestry: Bernardino Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’
Twelve overlapping stories across over 450 pages. A novel ‘bursting at the seams’ (Guardian). A book without a single full-stop. Bernardino Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other invites scrutiny about its structure and how it stitches together the twelve narrative patches of the quilt. Or is it: … how it constructs the twelve-piece mosaic? I think…