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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780571346615 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Faber and Faber |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2018 |
| Series: | Faber Poetry |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dear No. 24601
The future is an eye that I don’t dare look into
Last night I dreamed I was a ball of fire
and woke up on the wrong side of the room
this is a recurring dream
I share an apartment with my twin sister
Enclosed is a photo of us on a tandem bike
I forget which one I am
Sometimes I wake up believing I am her
she is me
and there is nothing about the day to indicate otherwise
Weeks stack up this way
As a girl I did not do well with other children
Unable to see the fun in games
which were only ever maddening
I paid close attention to the weather
delighting in hail and not much else
save a prized collection of Hummel figurines
derived from the pastoral sketches
of Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel
German Franciscan nun and talented artist
Her simple peaceful works
drew the enduring hatred of Hitler himself
You know Hummel translates as ‘bumblebee’ in German
and they say she was always ‘buzzing around’
What do you think do we grow into our names
or does kismet know a thing
One name can mean too much
the other not nearly enough
The details make a difference
like sitting on the white cushion
as opposed to the blue
white is pure of course
but my soul’s been in the bargain bin since Russia
and Lenin’s tomb
I had a moment there
among the balustrades
and once that moment had expired
it graduated
from a moment to a life
Beauty Milk
I don’t matter.
I am a blemish,
a fragment,
an apartment.
I am a multiplication
and a made-up belief.
I am nothing for days afterwards.
They say ‘sum’ about me
because they believe I am expanding.
Really I’m too clean cut.
This one time I was owned
but he wouldn’t pay the charges
at the German border.
Russia is the pits.
Sister
Sister, listen to me – tonight our father will pull open the heavy door of our home, walk with his large boots into the kitchen and drop a pig on the table. In the morning, peasants with children and glassy-eyed babies will enter, sniffing at us like animals, noting the absence of a mother who lays out cold plates, white bread.
Healers
I encountered a scaffold
outside the Holy Trinity Church in Vladimir.
At first I didn’t notice her
slumped against the side of the church –
she was pretty small for a scaffold, pretty un-
assuming. Her safety mesh
was torn in places and sun-bleached all over
and threatened to dislodge
due to a forceful wind that was typical
of the season. She was shaking.
She was fundamentally insecure.
She told me that good foundations are essential
but the men who had put her together
hadn’t taken advantage of the right opportunities.
Now, each day, someone came by
called her ‘unsafe’ and also ‘a liability’
then left, failing to initiate the dismantling process
that yes would have been painful
and slow, but kinder.
International visitors to the church
blamed her for the mess of tools and rags
on the grounds and for the fact
that they could no longer see
the church’s celebrated mural
depicting Saint Artemy of Verkola
unusually pious
highly venerated
child saint killed by lightning.
His dead body radiated light
never showed signs of decay
and was in fact said to have effected
multiple miracles of healing.
I said comforting things to the scaffold
but she only seemed to lean more heavily
against the side of the church.
We are rarely independent structures she said
before she dropped a bolt pin
which released a long section of tube
which released another bolt pin
which released several wooden boards
which scraped another tube
and made an unbearable sound.
Table of Contents
ContentsPreface 5
Dear No. 24601 10
Beauty Milk 12
Sister 13
Healers 14
Eight Phrases 16
Who Is Mary Sue? 17
The Engine 39
Untitled 51
Before 52
As bread is the body of Christ so is glass
the very flesh of the Devil 54
The Palace of Culture and Science 56
Poor Clare 57
A Course In Miracles 58
The Saints 60
Death Pact 61
Ed 62
Bunny 64
Autobiography 66
The Engine Continued 67
Anna Karenina 79
a whistle in the gloom 81
A.S. 92
Ed 93
Postface 95
Note on Fan Fiction 101
Other Notes 102
Acknowledgements 104
Preface
I recently read a novel that resisted a conventional representation of self. At the outset, the protagonist – whose name is mentioned just once in the book, in passing – travels abroad to teach on a short-term writing course. With little introspection or background provided on her part, reality is built primarily through others’ life experiences (or what they choose to share of them) as filtered through the narrator’s working memory and language. These second-hand accounts fill the book in reams, beginning with the marital history of an older man – the narrator’s neighbour on her outbound flight – and finishing up with the recent events in the life of another visiting writer. The latter, a playwright, tells
the protagonist of her involvement in a violent mugging and the behavioural changes, including a fresh inability to self-express and
a compulsive need to consume sugar, precipitated by trauma. At the foot of these stories – at once ludicrously vague and full with detail – is a frayed hole, a conspicuous lack of identity in the very place that has most often been tasked with generating readerly incentive.
Threadworms, stray hairs: loose threads surround the hole, invading it. They are disturbing: they are unruly, and they emphasise a persisting absence.
In another book, a non-fiction, the same author recognises the ice cream parlour as a place in which personal identities are sometimes fleshed out. Here, she writes, children are generally happy to select the familiar flavours, whereas adults often experience an anxiety of self-presentation: the fear of misrepresenting their own ideas.