Posts By: Humphrey Astley

Review: ‘Kingdomland’ by Rachael Allen

About two-thirds of the way through Kingdomland, Rachael Allen’s debut collection, the text neatly encapsulates some of its key motifs – oppressive heat, procreation, bodily angst – in a single stroke: The day is an oven. I float outwards in a concentric circle. I will know the pattern of your knee. I sit by the river…

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Review: ‘American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin’ by Terrance Hayes

Tradition and fashion aside, what Terrance Hayes does with 14 lines, over and over, is what seems necessary: the focusing and finessing of a complex voice – by turns melancholy, crass, urbane, incensed – into a mode that keeps his train-of-thought moving while calling at every stop. Rhythm and momentum in poetry are not the…

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Review: ‘The White Book’ by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith)

This new book in English from South Korean writer Han Kang may be hard to categorise but it does have a story, which should reassure anyone worried that a text on the colour white (or non-colour white, depending on how you look at it) will be insubstantial. As it turns out, this diary-cum-sketchbook may be…

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Review: ‘Hello. Your Promise Has Been Extracted’ by Ahren Warner

Though you might not recognise it, history is here again. They say the European project is coming apart, and I suppose time will tell. In the meantime, the least an artist can do is to try to bear witness. A wave is crashing over this century as it crashed over the last, and while there…

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Review: ‘Joy’ by Sasha Dugdale

Sometimes you read a work that is so clearly deserving of the accolades it’s received that it restores your faith in things. Sasha Dugdale’s ‘Joy’ – the title-piece of this, her fourth collection from Carcanet – is such a work, having won the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, and rightly so. A playwright…

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Review: ‘Proprietary’ by Randall Mann

‘If scent were white // noise,’ suggests the title-piece of Randall Mann’s Proprietary, ‘doughnuts would be that scent.’ One barely has a chance to get one’s lips around the powdery dough of these white-noise doughnuts, this cultural soma, before the speaker informs us that ‘The factory won’t sell at any price. / The building next…

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Review: ‘Savage’ by Rebecca Tamás

It’s fitting that the first word in Savage (Clinic) is ‘please’, thus priming the reader for the pamphlet’s themes of vulnerability and need. Indeed, much of Rebecca Tamás’ technique hinges on a kind of self-psychoanalysis, an exploration of the individual’s sacred/profane duality as revealed by ‘love that’s virulent, ugly, nutshell tight, / love that throws out…

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