Tag: poetry
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Personal politics and the modern English language: Mary Jean Chan’s ‘Flèche’
There’s too much to praise in Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche: the characterful depths it presents of its persona, the problems they encounter with queer becoming, the gentle lyricism that appears straightforward but is anything but. It is about family, about love—and also about fencing. Of the topics that I could cover, I’m going to examine…
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Writing (a) genealogy: ‘Surge’ by Jay Bernard
In ‘Kombucha’, a prose poem about, among other things, menstrual mooncups, Jay Bernard’s persona asks: When I stare at these bottles, it’s blood that has been three times enlarged. Who says we have no genealogy? Who says that if I line them up, as ornaments, a blood archive, then it isn’t like us having had…
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Not quite everything: ‘Fatherhood’ by Caleb Klaces
The question of form may never be resolved. Is the novel better than poetry? Are short stories just novel-lite? In Fatherhood (Prototype, 2019), Caleb Klaces avoids that scrutiny completely by mixing two of those forms together. Fatherhood combines ‘prose and poetry in an experimental work of verse fiction’. The text tells the story of Caleb…