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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         -im Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]   [adjust             Even the white noise here is different—        trACKing] there’s no boulevard, no blue and breathing ocean The streets—more quiet now, winding through rain, hidden parks and open markets— [chriiiiiiiing] are cobbled, and twist off into alleys less sinister than ours There’s history [REprise] in the street names, true—but the mystery, the footsteps’ muffled click, the concrete sea bRZeE rolling below my window is tame, bloodless… [BRiX ‘98] We fell off the world for years in LA [SoDen I can only remember the haze now,             eAcH       corP how our vista was never really clear                                       oWn of smog, or planes, or neon bellied clouds                                           a sOul?]   I split Left you standing with a pocket [My grambag                full of lock-                            of                  less keys, a few bucks, two lighters and I tRixY                         drove the forty miles back home Years later, rEds]                                        I’m hoping, perhaps we can just look back,                                         tuchhhh—                                                                                —MIDAZ recall it before the cards were flipped— our own Cassidy and Sundance era?    (EPIX x I turned my back on California,                             X) on those two-for-one, from out the Honda [Malverde]       hustlers, sunburned illegals, los santos… And I have thought about nothing else, since   I heard about your dazzling surrender [oUr buRnT-    Guess I should ask ‘from whose bourn’ and all that, but I can’t fucking see how it matters oUt      SCAPE]                                                           Anyways, it’s probably December right now in your coastal town, every crow                 * JauREZ— crowding the power lines, jostling Each one                                       Bosnia vacant, thinking only of its single                    del SUR* green walnut, the distance to the pavement                             ‘grAFT’                                                             -NoV16, 2009-    

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

Prize Entry

April 2016

Mute Canticle

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure...

fiction

January 2015

One Out of Two

Daniel Sada

TR. Katherine Silver

fiction

January 2015

Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what? The Gamal sisters were...

Art

Issue No. 14

Lenin was a Mushroom

Thomas Dylan Eaton

Art

Issue No. 14

Cast as the ‘savage, ugly’ part in the Popular Mechanics live show, Necrorealists were radical artists in their own...

 

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