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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...

A twilit bedroom Silence Ceiling view of the base of a hyper-extended bed—the length of a catwalk Slow pan of ruffled bedsheets in close-up—magnified sheets like an Arctic mountain range Shitty camera quality—that of CCTV or a sex tape, colours drained Zoom out Slow tracking shot reveals one by one, as in a Tarkovsky film, a series of sleeping faces—silent apparitions of celebrities—Taylor Swift—Kanye West—Kim Kardashian—eyelids shut, lips loose, mouths ajar—a slumbering parade of pop royalty—not in their usual livery but nude—trashily nude—classically nude Most of the body parts—arms and torsos and necks—are purpled with tattoos Most of the nipples—black or pink—are pierced A pink Caucasian cunt in extreme close-up Blackout   ‘At once both superficial and deep,’ a man’s voice intones—Kanye West’s We fade up on Kanye, wearing a silver jacket, sat in a swivel chair at a mixing desk being interviewed by journalist Zane Lowe ‘Both deep as a canyon and superficial as a razor blade,’ Kanye says, eyes wild, head dipped ‘So, you think you’re pushing the boat out?’ Lowe asks ‘I’ve reached a point in my life,’ Kanye answers loudly—as drums begin a 4/4 beat—’where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting’ Freeze-frame close-up of Kanye’s face, mouth agape—an oil painting filter is now applied to Kanye’s facial image—bass drum and hi-hat kicking—and now all at once a synthetic accordion and descant recorder come in doubling a jaunty melody—the freeze-frame of Kanye’s face cuts for a split-second to an image of Freddy Kruger—then black—and Kanye’s rap enters:   For all my Southside niggas that know me best I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex Why? I made that bitch famous   A glittering legend flashes up on the screen:   ☆ FAMOUS ☆ BY ♫ ‘KANYE WEST’ ♫   ♦   Shoulder to shoulder, half concealed by the sheets, half revealed by the sheets, in that enormous bed they lie, the celebrity bodies in Kanye West’s ‘Famous’ video And lie in more senses than one, all the bodies being at once hyper-real and hyper-fake, seemingly real yet actually prosthetic But, once become an image, isn’t everything real?

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

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Mai-Thu Perret

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 1

Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s ongoing, fourteen year-old project The Crystal Frontier is a multi-disciplinary fiction chronicling the lives of...

feature

July 2013

The New Writing

César Aira

TR. Rahul Bery

feature

July 2013

The way I see it, the avant-garde emerged at a point when the professionalisation of artists had consumed itself...

 

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