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Rebecca Tamás
REBECCA TAMÁS is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her pamphlet Savage was published by Clinic, and was a LRB Bookshop pamphlet of the year, and a Poetry School book of the year. Rebecca’s first full-length poetry collection, WITCH, was published by Penned in the Margins in March 2019. She is editor, together with Sarah Shin, of Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, published by Ignota Books. Her collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman was published by Makina Books in October 2020.  

Articles Available Online


Interview with Ariana Reines

Interview

July 2019

Rebecca Tamás

Interview

July 2019

I first became aware of Ariana Reines’s work through her early poetry collection The Cow (2006), which went on to win the prestigious Alberta Prize. I...

Essay

Issue No. 24

The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult

Rebecca Tamás

Essay

Issue No. 24

  I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have...

Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are not entirely what they seem We know this because there is something quietly sinister about the rich, and in particular the rich, white nuclear family, whose protection of their mutual interests often calls to mind the way that words like ‘family’ are used in reference to the mob We know it, too, because we first saw Lucie fifteen years ago escaping from the basement of a slaughterhouse, shaven-headed and emaciated and covered in blood, and we are well-versed enough in the rules of cinema to know that women who escape — provided they have escaped early in the run-time — tend to come back for revenge She kills the father, then the mother — then the son, who hesitates when she asks whether he knew what his parents did to her a decade and a half ago, and then the daughter, who is fourteen or fifteen, and probably had not been born when Lucie ran, screaming and bleeding, from that basement When the family is dead, it is the mother’s corpse she shakes and rages at, as if to prove that what is happening is not about the father’s sins, but about a specifically feminine model of transference   These are the opening scenes of Pascal Laugier’s 2008 horror MARTYRS, a film usually classified as being part of the late-noughties genre known as the New French Extremity, written when Laugier was suffering from clinical depression The film posits the existence of a matriarchal cult that kidnaps adolescent girls, subjecting them to prolonged torture as a means of making them into seers and interpreters of a presumed afterlife What they hope for is undeniable proof of the existence of a God, whatever form that God might take  ‘You lock someone in a dark room,’ the cult’s leader, who goes by the name of Mademoiselle, later explains ‘And they begin to suffer You feed that suffering Methodically, systematically and coldly And make it last Your subject goes through a number of states After a

Contributor

July 2015

Rebecca Tamás

Contributor

July 2015

REBECCA TAMÁS is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her pamphlet Savage was published by Clinic, and...

Interrogations

poetry

Issue No. 14

Rebecca Tamás

poetry

Issue No. 14

INTERROGATION (1)     Are you a witch?   Are you   Have you had relations with the devil?   Have you   Have...

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fiction

May 2016

Panty

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

TR. Arunava Sinha

fiction

May 2016

She was walking. Along an almost silent lane in the city.   Work – she had abandoned her work...

poetry

Issue No. 11

Poems from [---] Placeholder

Rob Halpern

poetry

Issue No. 11

Obscene Intimacy My soldier was found unresponsive restrained In his cell death being due to blunt force injuries To...

Art

March 2015

Tropenkoller

Lothar Hempel

Art

March 2015

Taking the title Tropenkoller (Tropical Madness), German artist Lothar Hempel’s latest exhibition at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (Feb 27-Mar...

 

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