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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...

Writing in the introduction to his Fifty Poems in 1988, Ian Hamilton commented on his younger self, ‘But did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead? In some ways yes, I think I did’ Hamilton was at the extremist end of ‘faith’ in the lyric’s potential, a belief that poetic language might reach beyond ordinary dialogue: ‘While writing a poem, one could have the illusion that one was talking in a magic way to the subject of the poem One might even think that this is doing some good, making things better’ The ‘you’ in Hamilton’s poems was confined to a few, imagistic details, in terse addresses which owed a debt to Thomas Hardy’s poems of 1912 and 1913, written by Hardy in the throes of guilt which followed his wife Emma’s death A poetic version of esprit de l’escalier; all the tenderness and devotion he hadn’t shown during their marriage was expressed too late, addressed to Emma’s wished-for ghost as if she were capable of listening As with Hamilton, any comfort provided was, ultimately, only for the poet, but the instinct to speak to the dead in the hope of getting through casts the poem into a secular equivalent of the Eucharist, aiming to summon a real presence through linguistic ritual Denise Riley’s extraordinary elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’, demonstrates some of this magical thinking Riley writes ‘It’s all a resurrection song/Would it ever be got right/The dead could rush home/Keen to press their chinos’ That ‘belief’ which Hamilton once clung to, that the platonic poem might bring back the dead, has some ‘truth’ to it, at least on a semantic level Riley speaks to her unanswering ‘you’ in the present tense: ‘Outgoing soul, I try to catch/You calling over the distances/Though your voice is echoey’ At least for the duration of the poem the ‘you’ is summoned, and while they can’t reply there is a charge to it; they are implicit and implicated, albeit ‘It’s not like hearing you live was’   Aspects of Riley’s work seem to have informed Emily Berry’s

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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Interview

Issue No. 16

Interview with Gary Indiana

Michael Barron

Interview

Issue No. 16

In July 2015, T: The New York Times Style Magazine gathered twenty-eight ‘artists, writers, performers, musicians and intellectuals who...

poetry

January 2012

Mount Avila

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘el techo de la ballena’   Time to be climbing out of time as the wild city rates it,...

Art

June 2012

'The Freedom of Speech Itself', or the betrayal of the voice

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Art

June 2012

‘The instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridised phonetic form, is testimony not to someone’s origins but only...

 

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