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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...

INSERT: Little Pistorius in a Sleevelet of Mirrors A ballet performed by the corps du ballet of S——– to the music of Satie’s Embryons desséchés in the middle of the opera, Pistorius Rex, & in the very womb of the theatre which cannot be located on earth NO-OUVERTURE: But an interlude, a Quaalude, under Europa, an etude, a vein where the scholar can ride a pen assassination, an arbour assignation in which a nymph snaps her neck and goes cyanic like a cygnet, her pupils unspooled, and a poet hangs his lyre amid the branches lyre-stage death of the author wearing a gold noise-cancelling machine for a crown and golden jump rope for a noose getting high, lying down like a jock on the highway with his hands in the curls of another jock because they saw it in a movie: how to love and bury their hands in each other: androphiles on the dividing line remember when the jocks all extinguished themselves in an Illiad of trust, magic, desire and idiocy? – Our opera’s got too much of these already! – so bring on the ballet already! TABLEAUX MORTES: Ahem The wealthy men of S——– would like to see their mistresses’ dinner-plate tutus and powdered thighs, teasing calves, ankles so easily cocked between thumb and finger Leave the slippers on, sister Tiny spoons for caviar and cocaine But the bone spoon is the best spoon Occiptal dishlet, better than Spode or a krater of the moon Place to sip Spores and spicules Dear eyebone! China white! Knockout punch! Fontanel! Ahem As patrons of the Opera, these men demand more ballets per Opera They are refugee princes, pencil manufacturers, salt-peter synthecisers, clockwork organisers, and beaver-pelt hats purveyors And also the purveyors of ringtones, Glocks, and daytrading software They sit in stalls and boxes with chains hanging down their chests because they are also mayors & brewers from New Glarus

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

feature

Issue No. 12

Foreword: A Pound of Flesh

George Szirtes

feature

Issue No. 12

1.   ANALOGIES FOR TRANSLATION ARE MANY, most of them assuming a definable something on one side of the...

feature

Issue No. 16

Scroll, Skim, Stare

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 16

1.   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples. It includes no examples because its...

poetry

November 2011

One Night Without Incident

Eoghan Walls

poetry

November 2011

Freak July mists blurred all from Portsmouth to Reading in a late summer sky turned wholly unfit for bombing,...

 

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