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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Alvaro Barrington, Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay

Art Review

October 2019

Kevin Brazil

Art Review

October 2019

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival...

Essay

October 2018

The Uses of Queer Art

Kevin Brazil

Essay

October 2018

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded...

WHISKY WITH MOTHER as the electric blue fades into the small hours and now, a long way from home, my hands are covered in excrement I didn’t know my own smell, the layer of smell that forms on the body as the hours without water go by My tongue gets distracted by eating grass Sucking on an animal’s hard udders, sucking on the fur, the teeth all dolled up, or imagining the death of your parents It’s all the same From the moment he entered my head, this saltwater hell Zealous hammering on my veins The trouble with my brain is I can’t hold it back, it rolls on and on through the spiky undergrowth like a bulldozer Where am I I don’t recognise these big houses I’ve never rounded this bend in the road Degenerate desire Damaging desire Demented desire I don’t know how to get back My mother will be blind drunk, sprawled on the sloping grass, her feet carved up by the blades The clouds are tree trunks at this time of night My hangover’s fierce and I collapse any old how to masturbate, my hair electrified, my skin hot, my eyelids stiff My hand works away then falls still as an insect, so that nothing is enough Me and him in a convertible Me and him on a muddy road Bodies shouldn’t have breasts after a certain age; when my breasts turn to thick heavy flesh I’ll have them removed Women should stop opening their sex, too I look for a word to replace the word I look for a word that shows my devotion The word that marks the spot, the distance, the exact centre of my delirium We should be like tiny snakes till the end, and be buried that way, in long holes like gutters I get up feeling anxious, my head thick with blood I walk round the house and open the windows The wind sweeps over the insect corpses trapped in the mosquito net He keeps jars back there full of rusty water and all kinds

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Nora Ikstena's ‘Soviet Milk’

Book Review

August 2018

Kevin Brazil

Book Review

August 2018

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember...

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poetry

July 2012

Fig-tree

John Clegg

poetry

July 2012

He trepans with the blunt screwdriver on his penknife: unripe figs require the touch of air on flesh to...

poetry

November 2013

Rescue Me

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

Pain comes like this: packaged in a moment of hubris with a backing band too big for its own...

Art

February 2014

Starting with a Bang: Hannah Höch and The First International Dada Fair

Daniel F. Herrmann

Art

February 2014

A spectre haunted the Lützow-Ufer – the spectre of Dadaism. It hung from the ceiling and peered down from the...

 

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