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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...

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision I shouldn’t mind about the gallery attendant He is not staring That’s not what his torch and lanyard is for   I have seen at least four people holding hands already and I’m only just out of the revolving doors They weren’t unpeeling to the root To kiss you should not feel like anything other than embellishment They, people, loads of people, have staged kiss-ins at Sainsbury’s and in Southbank cafés precisely in solidarity with my freedom to kiss you They kissed en masse on Valentine’s Day with a hashtag and everything When that historian shot himself in Notre Dame two years ago, when Larousse dictionary mooted changing the definition of marriage, he was not thinking of me tarrying in this gallery gift shop, flicking postcards and studiously not-looking at you Larousse dictionary’s colophon is a woman blowing at a dandelion clock Have I used colophon correctly? Where are you   Dandelion comes from the French dent-de-lion, lion’s teeth   I am not biding my time   A lion would not baulk at kissing you, toothily   The French for dandelion is pissenlit This translates, broadly, as wet the bed I will wait   I could kiss you lightly, the side of your face, as if putting out a fire The gallery attendant is not looking at us I have spotted another couple kissing, a boy and a girl, like it was nothing, like they didn’t have to think about lions   When you puff at a dandelion clock, puff at its puff, it looks like you’re blowing a kiss   To kiss you would be plotlessness, and nothing like falling   The gallery attendant is not sizing up our haircuts In fact he’s looking the other way   The move was mine to make,   all gallery-hushed and happy as I reached for you   and   RIGHT   LET’S                                                                                

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

July 2012

Run, Comrades, #YOLO! — Cursory Notes on Radical Hashtag Forms

Huw Lemmey

feature

July 2012

I’m not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility. People can connect with each...

Interview

Issue No. 19

Interview with Álvaro Enrigue

Thomas Bunstead

Interview

Issue No. 19

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer who lives and teaches in New York. A leading light in the Spanish-language...

feature

Issue No. 10

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

David Harvey

feature

Issue No. 10

Prospects for a Happy but Contested Future: The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism   From time immemorial there have been...

 

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