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Rebecca Tamás
REBECCA TAMÁS is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her pamphlet Savage was published by Clinic, and was a LRB Bookshop pamphlet of the year, and a Poetry School book of the year. Rebecca’s first full-length poetry collection, WITCH, was published by Penned in the Margins in March 2019. She is editor, together with Sarah Shin, of Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, published by Ignota Books. Her collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman was published by Makina Books in October 2020.  

Articles Available Online


Interview with Ariana Reines

Interview

July 2019

Rebecca Tamás

Interview

July 2019

I first became aware of Ariana Reines’s work through her early poetry collection The Cow (2006), which went on to win the prestigious Alberta Prize. I...

Essay

Issue No. 24

The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult

Rebecca Tamás

Essay

Issue No. 24

  I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have...

I want you to be in my writing Maybe not you exactly Someone like you Will you like this version of you? Maybe not Will you recognise this version of you, as you? I hope so She has some of your qualities I say she because you are a trans woman, and it’s something about trans women that I’m writing Maybe you are central to it, or maybe incidental Either way, you figure in the text What makes me think I know anything about you? And what makes what I think I know something I can put in a piece of writing to which I own the rights?   As it happens, I’m a trans woman too Yay for girls like us! We’re at the bar at Mood Ring I buy us drinks Once our server is out of earshot, we dish I’m sorry you got harassed on the subway That happened to me just last week Oh, we saw the same surgeon His office never returns your calls It’s hilarious that we both fucked that other trans girl – she sure gets around Ah, but you have some stories I don’t Now, honey, tell me all about your pain   Wait, something’s wrong here If this is our shared story, why do I need you to tell it so that I can write it? Because of things we don’t have in common I’m white, middle-class by origin, with a good education, living in an apartment my partner and I own I transitioned late after securing a comfortable life In a word: bourgeois A bourgeois life brings relative freedom from pain But it’s boring This is the dilemma constitutive of bourgeois literature So I look to you for a good story I have the luxury of having feelings about other people’s feelings To feel, but also to judge, at some remove It will be your story, in my text – and my copyright It’s the business of bourgeois literature to stake claims to property rights over others’ pain   I don’t know that a book can even make a claim

Contributor

July 2015

Rebecca Tamás

Contributor

July 2015

REBECCA TAMÁS is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her pamphlet Savage was published by Clinic, and...

Interrogations

poetry

Issue No. 14

Rebecca Tamás

poetry

Issue No. 14

INTERROGATION (1)     Are you a witch?   Are you   Have you had relations with the devil?   Have you   Have...

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Art

November 2015

None of this is Real

Anna Coatman

Art

November 2015

Rachel Maclean’s films are startlingly new and disturbingly familiar. Splicing fairy tales with reality television shows, tabloid stories, Disney...

Art

Issue No. 7

Pyramid Schemes: Reading the Shard

Lawrence Lek

Art

Issue No. 7

These sketches were created to illustrate an essay by Lawrence Lek in The White Review No. 7, ‘Pyramid Schemes:...

feature

November 2015

Anatomy of a Democracy: Javier Cercas

Duncan Wheeler

feature

November 2015

20 November marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of General Franco. And while the insurrectionist’s victory in the...

 

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