Support, support

30 August 2018

£6

Short Royal stapled

978-1-9999304-5-5

Helen Charman

'[W]ild, bright, precise . . . reckless yet controlled, strange but lucid, and completely deliberate in its impact.'

Rebecca Perry

'Language, identity and the structures that house them are questioned and destabilised in these deeply thought, tender, experimental evocations.'

Rachael Allen

'The muting/muffling of the female voice through well-worn tropes of loudness, hysteria, ambition, what it means to be “too present” is deftly tackled throughout the entire pamphlet: how to do it, how not to do it too much, how to do it enough, how not to care.'

Shoshana Kessler, Ambit

Support, support is a house in which lovers are made up with the bed in the morning, where imaginary keys are mooned over, plates left out, where only the radio delivers a longed-for voice. This house is both a desire for and a fear of domesticity, where another’s presence is both an ‘ordeal’ and an ‘ideal’, and the promise of shelter is subverted by gaps and damage, by cruelty and claustrophobia. Here, the taxi cab is safer than the house, than the ironically named Care Home, than the party you leave in tears, than the bed you lie awake in, than the womb, than the closeness you both did and ‘did not invite’. In order to build, you must dismantle, these poems say, borrowing from songs, novels, poems and historical documents; ‘you make a home for yourself in narrative.’ This is a debut of great power from a bold and radical new voice.