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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

As I swam in the bathtub, they wondered what they had done to have a fish instead of a daughter My father sat back as I thrashed against the hook of his hands His mouth and eyes: three blank holes, staring at the creature he reeled from his wife’s thighs Mother pressed my thin-lipped grimace to her breast Nipples bloody, pink as worms, she thought I would bite if not suck She wondered if it was the poison she ingested while I was gestating She worked at a plant where beets burned into sugar Smoke drifted in manufactured clouds Air sweet as pure honey Father believed it was punishment for all the fish laid on my grandfather’s butchering block Frantic, golden eyes wide as the screwdriver came for their brains Maybe she’s not a penance, my mother said, but a gift from God So many of Jesus’s miracles were born out of swarms of bass And maybe it was the thought of God loving them so much, he crept between their entwined bodies to deliver a wonder Maybe it was that their trailer home, with its canyons of cracked vinyl, peeling paint needed a little magic Or maybe it was the look in my fugitive eyes when I stared back at my father— so human, so afraid of death— that made him decide to ignore the operas of sirens that sprang in shipwrecks from my lips He cupped me in his palm My scales slipped off Like a sequin cocktail dress, they collected on the floor and revealed skin Vulva ugly and purple, loose like the lips of a many-hooked fish, but human   See, my mother said, it’s a child after all

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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feature

Issue No. 7

Comment is Fraught: A Polemic

Mr Guardianista

feature

Issue No. 7

When not listening to the phone messages of recently deceased children or smearing those killed in stadium disasters, journalists...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

fiction

March 2014

The Nothing on Which the Fire Depends

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

fiction

March 2014

Friday 9 November 2009   The coffee is lukewarm, but she doesn’t mind to drink it this way. She...

 

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