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Nicole Flattery

Nicole Flattery's criticism has appeared in the GuardianThe Irish Times and the LRB. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time was published in 2019. Her favourite Chantal Akeman film is News From Home.



Articles Available Online


Chantal Akerman’s ‘My Mother Laughs’

Book Review

October 2019

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

October 2019

There’s a scene in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere, about the Belgian filmmaker’s Chantal Akerman’s life and work, where she discusses her only...

Book Review

August 2018

Lorrie Moore's ‘See What Can Be Done’

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

August 2018

Lorrie Moore writes in her introduction to See What Can Be Done that, at the start of her career,...

Suicide without a cause, or silent sacrifice for an apparent cause which, in our age, is usually political: a woman can carry off such things without tragedy, without even drama — Julia Kristeva   I   I return to a former self, ghost or shadow self emerging from a glimmering light;   Woolf’s ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’   Life as circularity, inevitable return to a womb-like space, a space of the maternal?   Where do the dead go after they die? What nether region do they inhabit?   Where did the Hakka people come from? Peripatetic tribe from north-east China   She comes from people without a home, or fixed position She is condemned and doomed to wander looking for her place in history   I conjure up the past, delving into the recesses of unknown memory and time   I am returning to the source The original source The point of all our origin But these origins go further back beyond Western tradition, beyond the story of holy innocence fabricated in the myths of Adam and Eve, and the notion of a God the father And it does not reside in the maternal womb either, that place of warmth and nurturance, which begins with love   I invite mystery I return to our innate energy, excavating deeply layer upon layer of our consciousness   I breathe in the light; I inhale deeply and exhale   Where is the point of our origin?   I am digging deep I have to go further than the surface of things, back through space and time   I uncover hidden treasure buried for centuries, and carefully retrieve it for future purposes   Filtering through the coloured papers of memory, those delicate, fragile and carefully processed pieces of our past and history felt in my bones and body   In the beginning there was the Word And the Word is me My words become me, and I become the word, a flurry of mixed phrases, half-spoken sentences, articulate in their gibberish   I try to find the language that defines me, become a whirling dervish, caught up in a veil of spinning letters They fly around me, and I try to catch them   In the beginning there was

Contributor

January 2018

Nicole Flattery

Contributor

January 2018

Nicole Flattery’s criticism has appeared in the Guardian, The Irish Times and the LRB. Her story collection Show Them A Good...

Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘Her Body and Other Parties’

Book Review

January 2018

Nicole Flattery

Book Review

January 2018

I’m reluctant to admit this but it’s often easier for me to write about a book I hated rather than a book I loved....

READ NEXT

Essay

Issue No. 18

The Disquieting Muses

Leslie Jamison

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   In Within Heaven and Hell (1996), Ellen Cantor’s voice-over tells the story of a doomed love affair...

poetry

February 2014

Promenade & Dinner: Two Poems

Joe Dunthorne

poetry

February 2014

Promenade I was pursued by an immersive theatre troupe two of whom lay on the textured paving and performed...

feature

September 2017

On The White Review Anthology

The Editors

feature

September 2017

Valentine’s Day 2010, Brooklyn: an intern at the Paris Review skips his shift as an undocumented worker at an...

 

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