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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

I met the poet Rachel Zucker on a hot July day in New York, where she grew up and has lived almost all her life The city felt full of fury against Donald Trump’s immigration policy: children were being separated from their parents on the southern US border That week Zucker had protested with her family Her eldest son was at home when I visited; soon he was going to college, to Yale, where Zucker studied before doing an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop When we met, she was about to travel to Berlin with her youngest   Such details (not these, but others) might be gleaned from Zucker’s poems Writing in the tradition of confessional poetry, she exposes what Sharon Olds would call the ‘apparently personal’ But her books of poetry – most recently Museum of Accidents (2009) and The Pedestrians (2014) – along with her lyric memoir MOTHERs (2014) and the ‘poemic’ Home/Birth (2010), co-written with Arielle Greenberg, also contain a lot of the world Her aesthetic is inclusive, her attitude open: this is writing susceptible, in the best way, to influence, interruption and doubt In this moment, Zucker’s impulse towards dialogue feels right, politically and ethically She has said that she reads the poetry of others to find out how she should live I admit to approaching Zucker’s work in the same state of need: I discovered her writing as a new mother attempting to reconcile a divided life, and I go to it – as I went into this interview – looking for company and guidance in feeling ambivalent   Equally sustaining is Zucker’s podcast Commonplace, in which she has long, in-person conversations with poets (and, less regularly, with those she calls ‘other people’) Now nearly 60 episodes in, Commonplace is an incredible archive of contemporary US poetry: from Claudia Rankine to Danez Smith and Anne Waldman, Zucker’s guests discuss their craft and process, and they read their poems But more compelling even than the frequent insights into the artistic values of leading American poets is what these thoughtful, engaged and articulate people reveal about how they live

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Feature

Issue No. 19

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

feature

September 2012

Existere: Documenting Performance Art

David Gothard

Jo Melvin

John James

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

September 2012

The following conversation was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in May 2012. The event took place...

fiction

March 2013

If Not, Not

Natasha Soobramanien

fiction

March 2013

This story may or may not end in Venice and in silent, unacknowledged tragedy but let it begin here,...

 

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