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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision I shouldn’t mind about the gallery attendant He is not staring That’s not what his torch and lanyard is for   I have seen at least four people holding hands already and I’m only just out of the revolving doors They weren’t unpeeling to the root To kiss you should not feel like anything other than embellishment They, people, loads of people, have staged kiss-ins at Sainsbury’s and in Southbank cafés precisely in solidarity with my freedom to kiss you They kissed en masse on Valentine’s Day with a hashtag and everything When that historian shot himself in Notre Dame two years ago, when Larousse dictionary mooted changing the definition of marriage, he was not thinking of me tarrying in this gallery gift shop, flicking postcards and studiously not-looking at you Larousse dictionary’s colophon is a woman blowing at a dandelion clock Have I used colophon correctly? Where are you   Dandelion comes from the French dent-de-lion, lion’s teeth   I am not biding my time   A lion would not baulk at kissing you, toothily   The French for dandelion is pissenlit This translates, broadly, as wet the bed I will wait   I could kiss you lightly, the side of your face, as if putting out a fire The gallery attendant is not looking at us I have spotted another couple kissing, a boy and a girl, like it was nothing, like they didn’t have to think about lions   When you puff at a dandelion clock, puff at its puff, it looks like you’re blowing a kiss   To kiss you would be plotlessness, and nothing like falling   The gallery attendant is not sizing up our haircuts In fact he’s looking the other way   The move was mine to make,   all gallery-hushed and happy as I reached for you   and   RIGHT   LET’S                                                                                

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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poetry

July 2015

About Blue: Velestovo

Tatiana Daniliyants

TR. Katherine E. Young

poetry

July 2015

About Blue: Velestovo   1   …when I say the name: Velestovo, I think of deep blue. Of blue...

feature

Issue No. 18

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 18

This is the editorial from the eighteenth print issue of The White Review, available to buy here.    In 1991...

poetry

March 2013

The Humming Lady

James Byrne

poetry

March 2013

The humming lady arrives in a smiling orange smock and orders from the waiter a plate of overripe oranges,...

 

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