(Disclosure: Don’t think I know anyone this week (and sadly Édouard Levé is no longer alive) and I don’t know anyone personally working within these publications/presses bc I am a loner, apart from Hobart actually I do know EE from Hobart.)
Preface as always: Every Sunday without fail I throw up the freshest literature and photography I’ve read over the week, sometimes it’s a book, or a piece I saw in a magazine or an online zine, maybe it’s something I saw on social media, etc. If I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to a few of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some pieces more than others. Not everything will be everybody’s cup of tea, yanno, c’est la vie. And any titles that you see in bold are hyperlinked so if you click or tap them they’ll direct you straight to the source… or shopping basket.
I check all the writers and their social media (i.e. I stalk them and their bios) to make sure I absolutely get their pronouns correct, I don’t just blindly assume hes and shes, etc. So in case anyone’s concerned about that, dw I do this shit properly.
This week’s been weird, I’m starting to feel like I’m dissolving a bit. The lockdown feels like culture now. The last time I went to a bar seems like a dream. Some of the work I’ve read over the past few days has compounded this dazed feeling I’ve been having, and I’ve been dipping into a lot of work which was published way before this pandemic hit, like back in September 2019. I’ve been rereading Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait which is one of my favourite books. I’ve been reading a poet I came across in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Carolee Bennett. I discovered a new writer I’ve fallen hard for, his name’s Richie Hofmann and I’m torn between talking about his recent publication in Hobart and the piece he did in The New Yorker a while back (I guess I’m gonna talk about both), his poetry is so delicate and intimate, it’s like it breathes on the back of your neck. I loved Michael Sutton’s poems on 3:AM Magazine’s Poem Brut series and am now anticipating his next collection. Sarah Cavar’s a complete family / hstry was another piece in 3:AM which I kept reading over and over.
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Sarah Cavar’s a complete family / hstry, 3:AM Magazine, (RECOMMEND): The discourse around hysterectomy in writing generally tbh, is very small, practically non-existent. The number of people willing to talk about it outside of a medical, clinical sense is rare. Like abortion, it’s something people don’t talk about, they rarely unpack it in essays or poetry or what have you. It would be kind of obvious to say here that Sarah Cavar’s piece on 3:AM is brave (which of course it absolutely is), because how many people do you know are talking about hysterectomies in the context of trans-identity? But it’s the way they write about this experience, with an enviable, vivid gift for description. Sentences I loved: ‘Blood is a lineage. It begins in the toilet, rings of icing suspended in liquor. [...] The following morning I am discharge with my age-restricted scars [...] ‘The stitches were dissolving; they said goodbye in crimson streams. [...] Finally I told her to leave the room, wrangling my vagina, this traitorous beast’. Another line I love, which is just so powerful, ‘There is something poetic in scarring the site of the umbilical cord. I deny the very people whose (re)productive efforts rendered me possible; upended the dynasty whose heterosexual ehiteness brought them from poverty to vermount and priceless menus.’ It’s articulate and personal and deeply self-aware, and it’s that way from the off. Immediately I was drawn in by that play on words in the title, ‘a complete family / hstry’, hstry playing on history and hysterectomy here. There’s parts to this piece, this self-reflective voice which reminds me of Sontag’s diaries, the way Sarah breaks lines (this is particularly strong in the NOTES — ESSAY ENDING section). They also have a flair for dialogue, a way of pulling a reader into their periphery and having these difficult conversations with family members, wrestling with discomforting terms like ‘ramifications’. The violence of the relationship one has with their body, ravaged by identity. Internalising the reaction from parents whose hopes of becoming grandparents is no longer. As essays go, this is one of the most insightful, articulate and self-aware pieces of transgender literature I’ve ever read. It’s something that myself, I’m not at all equipped to understand, because I don’t share Sarah’s experience, I can’t pretend to believe I even get it. But they write with accessibility and profundity, acknowledging their being as the final sentence in their family tree (what a powerful thing to hold). A writer to watch.
Michael Sutton, poem brut #92 — music / lyrics, 3:AM Magazine (RECOMMEND): The fusion of note as word and as trebel clef, reinvented into fantastical illustrations. The first piece on here has a ‘creature-ness’ to it, I wonder of the animal in the notes pegged as sheets of music. Some of them feel more like graffiti, and I’m perplexed by what these new lyrics intimate, their renewed musicality in being cut up and stuck elsewhere. These are amazing pieces and I’m anticipating this collection’s release from Hesterglock Press in July.
Carolee Bennett, ‘Prettier When You Smile’ in Glass Poetry (RECOMMEND): I don’t know how I came across this piece, but it was published two years ago. I hungered for the nostalgia of sitting in a bar and eavesdropping on conversations, as Carolee Bennett does in this poem. Her note about this piece is really interesting, and I wouldn’t have guessed it as a partial collection of fragments from conversations, it kind of wrestles with the subjective voice as commentary and the objective role as listener to these ongoing conversations around her. There’s a solitude to the writing, but it’s not ill at ease with it, it’s comfortable solitude on a bar stool. I really loved this line: ‘The ones we love depart. / We squeeze in and out of anguish / like bees, no opening too small. The hive begins / with single cell. Our vocabulary for this kind of busy work is limited: disease, / disease, disease.’ It’s a really beautiful, complicated cocktail straddling thought and response, and reminds me of a time where we could do that, we could sit in a bar and listen to a human’s hum. And the themes of disease, death and intimacy in ‘Prettier When You Smile’ are more evident and conscious in our minds today, in an ongoing pandemic. Bowie says it best: Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.
Richie Hofmann, ‘The Romans’ (Hobart) / ‘French Novel’ (The New Yorker) (RECOMMEND): I read Richie’s first piece in Hobart this week and thought it was so delicate and vivid. Then I stalked him a bit and read more of his work. There’s something pre-Raphaelite about his writing, I don’t know if that sounds shitty and pretentious, but I just see his poems are paintings in my head, or even sculptures, like they seem to embody an architecture to them. It’s just the way he reminisces and articulates his lovers; it’s almost metaphysical. ‘French Novel’ in particular I just found fragrant, it’s like I could smell red wine and bedsheets and humidity and snow slush. I can sense the texture. And then ‘The Romans’ had a movement and a colour to it I could just see and feel. He has a flair for articulating scenery; as a reader, I’m in his eyes and I’m absorbing every detail. I could feel this new lover wafting the Polaroid, the shake. The tangibility of his memories is so potent, you feel as if you’re there, not as a witness but actually within the experience.
Édouard Levé, Autoportrait (RECOMMEND): I started reading Édouard Levé just over a year ago, and it was in this tumultuous episode of my life where I wasn’t really writing. If I did, I was forcing myself, and living in London was making me feel really depressed, although I now wonder whether that was more because of my MA and not the city. Édourd Levé was the best thing I got out of my course, and he came at a specific juncture when I was trying to understand how I could merge writing into photography, without taking photographs. I was investigating that relationship between the written and the visual. Autoportrait is a photo album in sentences. It’s a portrait of Édouard Levé himself, who committed suicide in 2007. He crafts this text masterfully, each sentence is like the shutter firing inside a camera, capturing an image, a new angle to his personage. For that reason it’s an intensely personal read. He oscillates between memories in time within the act of writing as memory, there’s a kind of meta-ness to it, a cubist quality to the text as a whole. He doesn’t start with his birth to his current present, rather the structure of the work is a series of non-sequiturs, a stream of consciousness stuck between frames. Sentences are mostly short, the longer you read, the more investigative and analytical it feels, into a forensic analysis of what makes Édouard, Édouard. It’s a book I go back to all the time, and the more I replay this series of images, the more unreadable it becomes. It’s also particularly surreal and disconcerting reading it now, as an artefact of Édouard Levé when he was alive. There is a coldness to his voice, a dismissiveness, and from the off it’s clear that his mental disposition, his depression, is a huge force in his life, the central focus to which all his perceptions, his affirmations, his unbothered demeanour seems to emerge from. The acuity of his self-description is pained by disconnection to the world around him, and that’s synonymous with the way he articulates himself in disconnected fragments. It’s one of those books you can read once and walk away from, but it leaves you altered and dazed, like the way you feel after watching a strange film in a dark cinema, returning to daylight. And since I picked up that text to read in class, Édouard Levé’s always stayed with me.
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That is everything from me for this week. I will be taking next week away to read Ariana Reines’s A Sand Book. It’s a big one and it’s gonna take me some time to read and think and write about it. I’ve also figured out that the quality of my reviews will generally be better if I give myself more time to sit down and think, so I’m going to be posting my reviews now every other Friday as opposed to every Friday (or around then, past couple of weeks it’s been on Sats and Suns). My reviews do border on being full blown essays, and they take a lot of time to put together because I prefer to go into detail. Obviously I can’t keep generating these big pieces in a week turnaround at a quality I’m happy with, that was always going to be too ambitious of me. BUT I don’t think Current-Reads will change, because I’m always reading small bits throughout the week anyway, and I’m happy to keep doing that every Sunday still.
NOTE TO WRITERS I AM REVIEWING: If I’ve said I’ll review your work and given you a date for when that review will be, that will still be the date I’ll review your work for. It won’t change. Scout’s honour.
