Category: Apocrypha

the writer does not write / the words that are there / or the words that are not . . .

Tumbling through the cunt of Elizabeth I, kissing boys and kissing girls, I lock myself inside my house with 365 rooms and fifty-two staircases.

O victor-bird, o vector, / I am like you, a non-state actor, / Death-fletched, alive, immune to all elixirs.

Valleys, oceans, crumbling earth, slices of tomato, milk, the presence of something ethereal, the absence of something wild.

I can only describe the narrator as a lost zoologist who must regress into memory and childhood yet also cannonball our awareness into a strange new world.

I am often concerned by the use of deaths as openers, and about the ethics of condensing the entirety of a person’s life into a soundbite, into an enticing introductory hook.

I don’t like émigré simply because I agree with the book’s sociopolitical underpinnings (although I do), but because it’s beautiful and well-crafted.

I’d heard of Carolyn DeCarlo, Sophie van Waardenberg and Rebecca Hawkes in publications like Starling, Landfall and Sweet Mammalian; AUP New Poets 5 gives them centre-stage.

I sat with this book for a very long time. Dipped in and out, from all points, like a capybara in an onsen.

Harkin is active in her writing and recording of what was done and to whom. People from the past return through her words, they do not remain buried in the archives.

This isn’t a book claiming to be anything it’s not. It’s a tender observation of the small things…

My notes for the remainder of this response continue for several pages. A loose-leaf file of notes and photographs is, it turns out, far harder to summarise than a traditional story.

From the outset, the cryptic explanation at the front of the book has me thinking in problem-solving, puzzles, codes. What links to what? What isn’t what it seems? What does it seem?