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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

Bound with animal fat, milk, or blood, Roman concrete is hardened over time Less water would ordinarily mean a less workable, yet stronger setting substance – concrete production being a tireless balance between liquid and solid against stability – but sanguine additives introduced bubbles of air, like tiny vehicles for the movement of solid materials through the cement, enabling flow and so multiplying the minutes between the mixing of the concrete and the moment it set for good A splash of water could be sacrificed without reduced workability Once the concrete set, each entrained microdwelling of air became a pore, allowing the now solid structure to absorb new water and for this to freeze, thaw, and exit the artificial stone without fracturing its temporary home In correspondence to the civilisation itself, strength was won and growth quickened with blood The first Pantheon was erected following the determining sea-fought battle of that last war of the Republic – the fight that saw Cleopatra exit, like a descendant of so many kings, with an asp to her breast Its replacement, built under Hadrian – concrete beneath brick – still stands The resistance of this ancient concrete was forged at scorching temperatures, the ash of Vesuvian eruptions precooked just as the limestone in Portland cement is sintered to clinker today Two parts volcanic mortar to one part lime; blood for tenacity; horsehair to reduce shrinking; laid by hand in line with its aggregate It built the Pantheon, the Colosseum, it rebuilt much of Rome and thousands of miles of road These days a soupier substance is needed to flow through machinery Watered down by industrialisation, and for the sake of economy, it is required to move faster, to build more It arrives ready mixed, slow-setting, weaker and bloodless Its quickflow corpus is reinforced now by steel; cracks begin to appear much earlier on   As the Empire faded, so too did the common use of concrete, its systematic application being the stuff of large-scale bureaucracy The Middle Ages had concrete, but not as much, nor as strong, nor so persistent In building material circles, it

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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poetry

November 2011

Cooper's Hawk

Elyse Fenton

poetry

November 2011

My breath’s the wind’s breathless down-stroke hasty claw like the gnarred finger of juniper just now clambering for a...

Interview

July 2014

Interview with Geoff Dyer

Tom Overton

Interview

July 2014

‘I’ve always believed that an artist is someone who turns everything that happens to him to his advantage’, Geoff...

fiction

December 2016

The Giving Up Game

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter....

 

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