Mailing List


Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

  Cupid’s arrow – a scissors’ beak I’ve stuck into my thighs, thirty kilometers from                                Minsk, sunstruck   The sun – ‘Chernobyl’ radio station Broadcasts its radiation; is always on The                sun speaks into the tulips’ microphones   Microphones – Viktsya sits by the cow’s udder like in a recording studio   Record – Yanina (blind) copies sheet music from my teacher’s songbook, Beethoven (deaf) for Accordion, into my notebook   Xerox – unavailable in the empire, prized like a spacecraft   Musical staff (according to the music teacher) – not Yanina’s kitchen shelves Unacceptable to reshelf at liberty, to adjust music pitch like spices   Music teacher – a beautiful woman, furious like Beethoven’s hair   Musical staff (according to Yanina) – rows of plank beds in the northern barracks ‘Notes are the bodies Rounded and flattened by day’s labour, either utterly dark or  insanely empty inside This is what makes music so poignant, so painful’   Notes, also (according to Yanina) – ladles   Beethoven: ‘Music should strike fire in the heart of man, and bring tears to the eyes of woman’   Yanina to Beethoven: ‘So music is a family brawl?’   Notes (according to the music teacher) – ladles full of water Yanina dumps onto Beethoven’s fire   My heart – on fire with fury every time the music teacher trashes Yanina’s blind copying I despise and secretly envy Beethoven for having nothing to do with plank beds in the northern barracks   A daily source of Beethoven – ‘Chernobyl’ radio station Also, the joy of summer rains   My mission: I combat gamma rays with music scales   Yanina tucks notes into the plank beds of music staff On one of them, she recognises                                       her old husband Her blindness           blurs all features          into the ovals          of notes   The cow chews rib-grass but there is no cow   Birds shred the clouds          with their dull beaks The woods are thin like soup         

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

Interview

January 2015

Interview with Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Scott Esposito

Interview

January 2015

Instructions: Take the high modernist and early postmodernist experimentalism of Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Move...

poetry

May 2015

Europe

Kirill Medvedev

TR. Keith Gessen

poetry

May 2015

I’m riding the bus with a group of athletes from some provincial town they’re going to a competition in...

poetry

October 2012

Saint Anthony the Hermit Tortured by Devils

Stephen Devereux

poetry

October 2012

  Sassetta has him feeling no pain, comfortable even, Yet stiffly dignified at an odd angle like the statue...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required