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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,...

  ARTICULATION OF SOLACE FOR W   We are mothering ourselves We are articulating solace for each other We are trying   to not fall in love Write love poems   to not fall in love   The faultline between the language of feeling and the language of catastrophe? We find it Our common language Our white world We are trying   to write close to it Even closer Closeness   changes Every poem was once impossible   Medieval torture devices Phalansteries That’s when it mattered That’s when you wrote it   Your father’s car speeds up the mountain like an unsent letter and you see someone dead   in your dream when he is still alive outside it, watching Kurosawa for you Aliveness   changes The kind   of violence that can be taken back The room   where someone not deadly realized they could care for you and didn’t Or did Now you imagine it emptied The kitchen   without a sink, windswept, glazed emerald-gold   You could picture solace only by bright walls, you said By, not in A nearness   We were listening to Arca together   We were dreaming about an apartment in the Mesozoic A meadow on Neptune   Thinking This relationship Between the cold pomegranates on the table and the porcelain bowl that couldn’t break apart one morning Solace I   wanted islands instead of worlds I wanted a new kind of ice One to hold on to, lying in bed at noon Bitter citrus grafting   like lightning onto my neck so I could be orchards as well As well   as seeds   of thunderstorms   What’s the point of time if we’re never out of it, knocking at your door, in landfall, in someone else’s house   I wanted we, in the second person I wanted unimaginable solace, in the second person   I wanted terrifying friends   to love me You,   carrying away gorgeous bags of treasure every time we meet Deadlight Clearly we were not who we were Clearly we were not dead We were not   mistaken I wanted to look exactly like you   (after Jenny Hval)   *   HERZZEIT   I

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....

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Interview

April 2012

Interview with Grant Gee

Evan Harris

Interview

April 2012

As the theatre is relit and the credits roll on Grant Gee’s latest film, Patience (After Sebald), an essay on...

feature

September 2012

Existere: Documenting Performance Art

David Gothard

Jo Melvin

John James

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

September 2012

The following conversation was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in May 2012. The event took place...

Art

Issue No. 1

The Idea Machine: Brion Gysin

Marina Cashdan

Art

Issue No. 1

Painter, performer, poet, writer and mystic Brion Gysin (1916-86) was an early prophet of our age. He was a...

 

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