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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...

‘The Audit’ and ‘Red Bank’ are excerpts from Schweig’s forthcoming book, Take Nothing With You (University of Iowa Press, 2016)   THE AUDIT   Groupwise, busy search Start off your week with some cake   Spatula, buy eggs Butter your kayak with cake Harvard, Washburn My girlfriend’s   son’s graduation party yesterday Blackberry outage Some cake (Investigate)   Harvard, spatula, my girlfriend’s son’s party yesterday Busy search, blackberries   The audit questions, investigates the state of yesterday Question the audit Forkful   of angel A wise group of suits, after delays, never came Harvard, margarine Calling and calling,   today, all the neighbors, utter undress, complete disarray, I propped the door open, which is to say   Washburn, kayak I propped my window with an eyeglass case Butter your kayak, cake       RED BANK   Deaths came out of the blue and the weather complied After, the sound of running water and the girls whose names     are not be mentioned He said my disposition was a fragment He drove one-handed Two rules: No complete lines A little blood in the water       EMPTINESS (CODA)   My brother says he can’t afford the future I’m living above a bakery in the city, and a bar next door There is no time Sometimes I hear music     My lover works a shit job, leaving early, coming back late My brother lives out on the shit great plains and says he can’t afford the future     Here, a storefront called The Essence Of Life is open all night What they sell, I don’t know, always the same guy chain-smoking out front, yelling into his phone     (Sometimes, this is the music) I spend time reading conflicting theories, having doubts I don’t think much about the future There is no time for The Essence Of Life     When my lover comes home hungry, we prepare dinner We take walks out by The Essence of Life, say “hi” to the smoking guy (We know nothing of each other)     My brother knows nothing of the future My mother is making plans for her life At night, over the phone, she says, Tomorrow, I’ll start over Downstairs,     music There is no time We know nothing of The Essence Of Life open all night, lit-up and always empty My brother says he can’t afford the future  

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

October 2011

The New Global Literature? Marjane Satrapi and the Depiction of Conflict in Comics

Jessica Copley

feature

October 2011

Over the last ten years graphic novels have undergone a transformation in the collective literary consciousness. Readers, editors and...

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

poetry

June 2014

Oeuvres

Edouard Levé

TR. Jan Steyn

poetry

June 2014

1. A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being. 2. The world is...

 

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