#ruth wiggins

[contremineur]

So our words let them reach then flicker into brightness.

Ruth Wiggins, from Lark-tongued (in The last book of Barkynge, Shearsman 2023)

In her debut collection, Ruth Wiggins recovers the forgotten voices of the nuns, abbesses and local women of the medieval abbey at Barking. Against a backdrop of famine, plague, war and spiritual upheaval, these poems explore the strange, uncertain days of the early abbey: mysterious visions, politics, violence and sisterhood, and end with the final abbess mourning the eradication of her home as the Dissolution unhouses her, her sisters, and countless others across Europe.

text from here

[thogdin]

Here’s me thinking around the idea of ‘body horror’ through five books over at Queen Mob’s Tea House:

“Body horror tends to deal with the too-much or too-little; with excesses and scarcity of form that test what our conceptions of the functioning body can be. But central to the idea of it, perhaps, and where the real horror lies, is the exposure of our unwillingness to really look at what our bodies are; how they function and how they degrade. Here, in reality, where the greatest body horror story is perhaps reduced to the two word “palliative care”, literature can do what genre films are generally forbidden from doing — to explore themes in a way that’s ill-fitting with their necessarily simple splattery aesthetic. Here, there’s room for tenderness. I’ve chosen five hopefully lesser-read examples of books that capture the body in its transformation, or flowery grotesqueness, or that simply present us with a point to start considering how the body — as we accept it — is in itself already an incongruous combination of disparate forms.”

[dreamer434]

In their proverbs, the Sumerians quoted Fox as saying — on having pissed into the sea — All the ocean is now my urine! Now, hang on there girl. I want to get a handle on your homeopathic incontinent ways, because I think you may be onto something. Firstly, what kind of fox are you that approaches the shore; no hen house to bother, no brambles to scoff? No line of emerald shit to booby-trap the garden with? Perhaps wherever we are, you are; so why not the beach? What promise did the salt ocean offer you, or appear to? Cured meat? Fish? After all, once a month I know I reek gloriously of kelp — salt and iron and yeast — an umami feast for the brave, or weak. Or were you worrying seabirds up on the cliff — stopped in your tracks, unable to resist. A little splish. The wind threshing your water as it fell — yellow, scattered, one or two drops of which maybe reached. Or perhaps you were caught short, coy on the beach, and entered the surf for decorum’s sake. All over the world, miles from the sea, girls caught between poor sanitary provision and a social imperative to be discreet find themselves in a dark place, their skirts about their waists. Maybe it wash the king’s men that saw fit to drive you into the sea. But clever, resourceful, you just thumbed your nose and learned to swim. Paddled to safer land, much like we once did. Your charcoal paws doggedly turning the cold pages of the sea. Pausing now and then to pee, a comforting cloud of heat. And which child among us hasn’t cast their blessing on the waves? Sent into the surf  by mothers, which of us hasn’t rightfully claimed the ocean as our own, or in turn been claimed?

Making Water by Ruth Wiggins