(Disclosure: I do know Lydia Allison and Sarah Fletcher from Writing Squad, and I know Amy Acre from Bad Betty Press but not well. Don’t know anybody else but you can trust my impartiality anyway folks, it’s not like the current-reads I’m reading are ever bad anyway).
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.
This week I went back to Bath Magg’s Issue Three and re-read Amy Acre’s poem Daddy Pig in there. I read Sarah Fletcher’s Office Poems which just came out as a limited edition print from Legitimate Snack, which is run by Aaron Kent from Broken Sleep books. I discovered a really cool writer and illustrator called Courtney Cook. Basically I read her latest piece in Split Lip Magazine and figured I’d stalk her website, and she’s just a breath of fresh air. I loved her comic called God Circle which I’m gonna unpack below, it was featured in The Rumpus. I also read an interview on The White Review with Pierre Guyotat, who passed away in February. (This really upset me, since Guyotat influenced by writing for the most part of 2 years now, which isn’t a long time but I haven’t looked back since). I’ve also been adoring the ingenuity of Lydia Allison’s collage and cut-up poetry from the Metro newspaper’s horoscopes.
Amy Acre, Daddy Pig in Bath Magg Issue Three (RECOMMEND): I am a quiet fan of Amy Acre’s writing. I just loved this poem in Bath Magg’s Issue Three. It’s the way Amy negotiates motherhood and self-hood in this poem, all the while admiring the unknowing cognisance of her daughter. The small gestures she makes in her play-things which are filled with an awareness beyond her age. It’s to be marvelled at. And it’s an incredible collision of the adult voice eclipsed by the child’s imagination, a non-sequitur nature of the child’s voice engrossed in play, in how whatever they say next will resonate deep and nod towards more serious connotations of growth... It’s how one loses pieces as they age, as responsibility engages with insolvability, like the threat of “a growing stack of papers”. How simple resolutions like, ‘daddy pig drops his keys down the drain / and mr bull digs up the road’ are rarely to be found in the complexities of adulthood’s hardened cement. I’m reminded of a story my friend Adam told me about something his son Edwin said when he was little: Adam was driving, and in the back of the car, Edwin thumped his fists against his seat and yelled, “Six thousand years and I’m still only five!”. The acuity of children is to be marvelled and feared, sometimes, I think. 😃
Lydia Allison, (Metroscope Cut-up Poems, I guess?) on her Twitter (RECOMMEND): I love these Metroscope cut-pieces I’ve been secretly stalking for the past couple nights from Lydia Allison. See most horoscopes say the same thing, in different ways for different signs. Lydia’s condensed and reimagined these awkward, cheesy horoscopes from the Metro newspaper, into tiny haiku-esque notes. They’re lovely and visual, and such a Gen Z way of refreshing Tom Phillips’s A Humument:
Lydia also has 3 gorgeous pieces in The Writing Squad’s Staying Home series, which I’m linking here for reading. Follow her for more humble ingenuity.
Courtney Cook, God Circle in The Rumpus (and her website) (RECOMMEND): These illustrated journeys are both witty and heartfelt. I really love the way her personality shines through her writing and illustrations, it’s almost as though Courtney is sat right next to you. I think articulating mental health diagnoses, anxieties, insecurities, sexuality in comics is a really refeshing idea that doesn’t necessarily undermine the complexity of these concepts. They’re colourful approaches to universalise an understanding, without compromising on the integrity and time it’s taken for Courtney to reach these revelations and understandings about herself and the way her mind functions. It’s about necessary steps to self-healing and removing doubt which you either foster inside of yourself or are planted in you from someone else’s words. In a comic, you can really explore a step-by-step visualisation of what it takes to get to a place where you’re comfortable, through images and thought bubbles. I think a lot of people will find some useful symmetry and resonance in God Circle, and what I admire most about Courtney Cook is that she doesn’t shy away from using her experiences to inform the discourses she’s opening up. That’s a brave thing to do when experiences like these can leave you vulnerable, and it’s a testament to her honesty. She’s a refreshing example of someone making art out of life unapologetically.
Sarah Fletcher, Office Poems from Legitimate Snack (SOLD OUT) (RECOMMEND): Sarah was kind enough to send me a PDF of her Office Poems collection so I could share my thoughts. If you’re going to buy a Legitimate Snack publication, words of advice here: get 👏🏼 in 👏🏼 there 👏🏼 fast 👏🏼 . These beautiful limited edition, books sell out very quickly, that’s because they’re handmade and being bound in a limited time-frame with limited hands, I imagine. And they’re genuinely gorgeous. Legitimate Snack publishes writers in between writing their upcoming collections and pamphlets, it’s genius, and such a refreshing idea. It’s run by Aaron Kent who runs the equally wonderful Broken Sleep Books.
These poems are fantastic lunch-break snacks—they’re like the manifestation of those silent trances you enter when eclipsed by office desk boredom and lust for the anywhere-else-but-here. Inspired by Frank O’Hara’s lunch poems, Sarah probes more sinister and sexual pockets of the office environment, she colours in the desks and mousepads, the chairs and ceiling tiles. She has an enviable gift for metaphor, and every piece in Office Poems invades the senses. I particularly loved ‘Desk Lunch’, this part really stuck with me: ‘I consume the violent foods to balm my mind / And make me more precise; // Veal; offal; any taken baby; / The zest of being twinly-livered, temporarily; // The trick is to identify with it / To make it more delicious;’ — just harrowing, a totally carnivorous invention of what’s always understood to be such a monotonous event. It’s quite sickening. Each title poses a banality which Sarah in turn reinvigorates into something quite unusual, often personal... there’s a sort of hypnagogic feel to them, take ‘Lunch Is’, for example: ‘the day’s arrhythmia is / island number five an / abattoir with floors of sand [...] / eye my deskscape’s / little illnesses / I send with every byte / the weight & filth / of a humiliated heart’. Sarah’s poetry is kind of a rose with a cigarette in its centre. I recommend anybody take this tiny collection with them to work.
Pierre Testard and Gwénaël Pouliquen, Interview with Pierre Guyotat in The White Review (RECOMMEND): It is really sad reading this interview since Pierre passed away in February. My old lecturer and friend Jerome Fletcher introduced me to Pierre Guyotat in my third year at university. I was interested in catharsis, in experimenting with writing that has no end, and I wanted to read creative literature on Algerian colonialism. It took me some time before I managed to acquire Éden Éden Éden because copies were very limited and very expensive. My best friend James Kaffenberger bought me the book, I have no idea how he found it so cheaply and when I say cheaply, it was the cheapest you’d be able to get it for. I’ve always admired Pierre Guyotat’s for his open condemnation of French Algeria, and for his documentary on the catharsis of war, a sand-stuffed existence purged by whoredom, fluids, and slaughter. His contributions are invaluable, and his influence on me and my writing has been massive.
I do love the way The White Review formats its interviews, and the pertinent questions posed by Pierre and Gwénaël. I will eternally envy these people for getting to talk to him. It is a really detailed, wonderful interview and his final answers about his writing kind of echo... it’s a chilling exeunt. I’m transfixed by the admission from Pierre where he says he has “finished” manuscripts which he’s “waiting to publish” but would have to revise them first. Now I’m thinking, will there be posthumous publications, or would that be an insult to his craft and to the time he was taking to consider carefully what he wanted to put out into the world? Have to wait and see I guess. There is an acuity and a deep self-awareness in each of his answers, its synonymous to his writing style. I wonder how people will receive Guyotat now that he is no longer with us.
That’s all for now, next week I’ll be reviewing Joseph Turrent’s The Moth Apocalypse from Haverthorn Press. Hope you’re all keeping safe and well. 💕
“ and at the very end of my exhalation, I found myself.” #quotestobreatheby #sarahfletcher (at Marion, Massachusetts) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnhKVIcA0mB/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=e1tdnycu7rro
