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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...

1 ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband’   Marriage falls into a specific category of things I don’t want to think about because their meaning swells the more you do Personally, socially, historically And yet, I am always interested in love stories: I listen to my friends talk about their love lives and when they apologise for dwelling on something – ‘is this boring?!’ – I answer, ‘love is the subject’ I am interested in how we organise our lives by connection with other people, in how we live alongside others, in how love is a social construct and a form of relation Love is the subject, by which I mean, love is something we want to narrate and discuss, because words make this inexplicable and incomprehensible thing – other people – feel less ambiguous, perhaps closer to certainty   I don’t mean to conflate marriage and love Quite the opposite – it is marriage’s function as an organising logic that I fear, that I believe does not work for anyone (especially not women) When I speak of marriage, it is not love I think of, but power I think about Phyllis Rose discussing this in the introduction to Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983): ‘When we resign power or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love Perhaps that is what love is – the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power’ But power is impossible to sidestep A page later: ‘Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives?’    Perhaps it is due to this ‘ideological bone’ that I am writing about marriage when what I’m really interested in is love I am not confusing the two as much as recognising what Devorah Baum delineates in the introduction to On Marriage, that ‘marriage is so fundamental to shaping our ideas about what it means to get attached that one

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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Interview

February 2016

Interview with Gerard Byrne

Izabella Scott

Interview

February 2016

I first encountered Gerard Byrne’s eerily dislocated films at Tate Britain, where 1984 and Beyond (2005–7) was shown on...

fiction

March 2016

Red

Madeleine Watts

fiction

March 2016

It was the first week of 1976 and she had just turned 17.   The day school let out...

feature

January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

feature

January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

 

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