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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...

http://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/luke-allan-first-winter-in-iceland   First winter in Iceland     Some mornings we’re woken by the sound of our neighbour sneezing I raise the blinds and drink the night-dulled water Half a pizza is sleeping in an open box in the carpark, topped with shimmering slices of rain The name sprayed on the wall of the bakery is my stepdad’s, but it seems so unlike him to assemble his ashes back into a body and be ready to start over A map in the window explains they are moving to a red circle containing a bakery from the future The rim of this glass tastes of both our mouths In the shower I sing guitar solos, and sometimes you come in to brush your teeth, and I feel love A woman is brushing her teeth and is my wife, I think Because sometimes it is hard to say out loud the thing you absolutely feel Then two ambulances pass each other heading opposite ways, and the morning is lost       https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/luke-allan-with-our-bodies-and-our-promises     With our bodies and our promises     You were in the bath, give or take Singing, ‘a single sip of coffee and my whole voicebox goes up in flames’ to the tune of Silent Night   Outside, as it were: amazingly real-sounding rain A drizzle so regular you could picture the shapes of the things it was falling on   One thousand years passed   O boy, those fingertips When you brought them together they made a little whoosh like sealing tupperware or what I thought it must be like to open an airlock on a space station ‘Welcome home, stranger,’ we sang, to the tune of  ‘welcome home, stranger, we sang’     https://soundcloudcom/user-856373367/luke-allan-lemon-ode   Lemon ode     This is how yellow feels between your fingertips Like a hard rain drop, or a soft star Like a stone with its moss on the inside Throbbing, silent, actual If  thoughts are the eroticization of consciousness, then lemons are the eroticization of sunlight Their pips scour the dark like owls

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

poetry

January 2016

Two New Poems

Elena Fanailova

TR. Eugene Ostashevsky

poetry

January 2016

(POEM FOR ZHADAN)   This (my) country will be the death of you Its military mathematics Its secret services...

poetry

Issue No. 20

Two Poems

Nisha Ramayya

poetry

Issue No. 20

JOY OF THE EYES   The future is not the beginning, but the forerunner, of a new intense-formation.  ...

Interview

July 2013

Interview with Paul Muldoon

Alice Whitwham

Interview

July 2013

A major figure in English-language poetry for decades, Paul Muldoon has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of...

 

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