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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.

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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...

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PONDERS LOVE   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, snow white and super blue: On the footpaths, we are told, radiators grapple with hydrants and at the marble quarry puss licks her belly until the shag is fluffed Get well cards addressed to third parties The cable car’s driving crank whirrs Here dwells Friedrich Nietzsche On ukulele, recording his propaedeutics in song Huzza, a subcutaneous Alpine ditty Dissimilarity as a religious doctrine The root chord: E minor Robert Walser says Friedrich Nietzsche was not Huh? What? What was I not? You were not loved Hence your resentment The vengeful perfidy of one unloved Meanwhile, new arrivals tuck in to hearty snacks Sausage Berries Poire Williams and Gentian Friedrich Nietzsche and the mild master of remorse converse on stacking chairs Are they onions? Are those contacts – or blows with the fan? Is it a hand-forged bark spud, swathed in camellia oil? We don’t know They speak quietly The mountains’ endless murmur Friedrich Nietzsche ponders love Robert Walser smiles in silence     THE ARBITER’S SICK   Honey protocols, hear how they mock I’m still asleep, they’re fighting already My assistants are whacking each other with hangers and brushes Oh boy, the arbiter’s sick today I see how they batter their limbs, whose workforce is mine, in order, thus squandered, to own themselves at long last Or so the assistants think How wrong they are! Whizz bang, the ankle joint, the nose bone Cat’s tongue, mop and deerfoot OMG Who’ll sew this for me? Who’ll stitch it up? Who’ll fetch and bring back, who’ll support, who’ll transcribe? What do mops and moping have to do with each other? Check it for me! Enough of the fisticuffs! When do we go to print? Assistants, get to work! The theme is: The arbiter’s sick today Let’s go! Mixed dactyls, skipping rhythms, inner universe of middle rhyme Bear me forth and write it all down Realise me in places where I cannot set foot And, while conciliation soon prevails, it’s still lying there, the cuddly toy of my tattooed assistant, who always was my favourite Ah! I’ll never sack a single one     TRANSLATION   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, you translated yourself – didn’t you? – into everything You translated your chemisettes, your crumbs, right on into The Great Glory, where they vanished instead

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

fiction

November 2014

The Ovenbird

César Aira

TR. Chris Andrews

fiction

November 2014

The hypothesis underlying this study is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive programme, which governs...

feature

Issue No. 15

Translation in the First Person

Kate Briggs

feature

Issue No. 15

IT IS 1 JUNE 2015 and I am standing outside no. 11 rue Servandoni in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. I...

fiction

Issue No. 3

Forkhead Box

Jeremy M. Davies

fiction

Issue No. 3

What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust...

 

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