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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...

Said by the New Statesman to be ‘at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry’, Keston Sutherland’s poetic and critical work is a headrush High on its own sensitivity, his writings explode the familiar modes of poetry, fusing the lyric tradition with the high-octane languages of protest, stock market exchange and information technology, with the individuated vocabularies of biochemistry, geology and neurology A sardonic yet rhapsodic disdain for high-capitalist consumerism and yappy Fox News neo-conservatism has won him international acclaim, and has given rise to six collections of poetry, numerous essays on poetics, politics and philosophy, his critical journal Quid and the co-founding of ‘nonconformist poetry’ publisher Barque Press   We met on a steely day in Sutherland’s hometown, Brighton, where he is Reader in English at the University of Sussex What follows is an edited version of a spooling conversation, ranging from ‘Enron to Xbox’ and back again, occasioned by the upcoming publication of his newest collection The Odes to TL61P (Enitharmon Press, April 2013) A poetry of unworkable postures and melodic germination, made famous by his astonishingly energetic readings (now widely available on Youtube), Sutherland rose to international eminence with the publication of a special edition of the Chicago Review in 2007, positioning his work alongside that of Andrea Brady, Chris Goode, Simon Jarvis and Peter Manson, and forming a major reconsideration of the field of contemporary poetry in Britain today Studying under Jeremy Prynne during his years at Cambridge, he is nevertheless resistant to the coterie demands of the ‘Cambridge School’, preferring instead to enter into critical dialogues with the visual arts, improvised music, and multilingual texts   Typified by a rampant lyricism, the warped soundbites and shifting logics of his work nevertheless confront political and social events; his collection Stress Position enacts torture sequences observed in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the demented puppetry of Hot White Andy, hailed by John Wilkinson as ‘the most remarkable poem published in English this century’, rages against our attitudes to twenty-first century consumerism His newest collection comments on all the ‘mucky adult clay’ that comprises our pressed

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


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February 2016

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February 2016

It was when we were living near the southbound exit. Maurice Echegaray had his company office on our staircase...

poetry

October 2013

Steam

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

Steam in the changing rooms, stripping off after the race, breathes like an engine. The air is filled up...

Art

Issue No. 2

Sri Lankan Contemporary Art

Josephine Breese

Art

Issue No. 2

Sri Lanka has developed a thriving, vital contemporary art scene over the past twenty years. New artists are emerging...

 

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