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The White Review
No. 27

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Sarah Moss’s books ‘negotiate the past and imagine the future’: interviewed in this issue, Moss discusses optimism, fridge-magnet clichés, the dangers of nationalist nostalgia,...

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The White Review Short Story Prize 2020
After a record-breaking 600 entries, we are delighted to announce the shortlist for this year’s Short Story Prize. The selected stories will be judged by Omar Robert Hamilton, Kishani Widyaratna, and...

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poetry

Three Poems

Poetry

January 2019

Cole Swensen

Poetry

January 2019

THE KITE C. 1755   One doctor of lightning, floating on his back down a river held his kite high, a sail in the...
On some level, I’m sure, every poem is a failure A lot of theory says as much, and I have always thought this was to do with our desire to reach out and touch the things that poems clamour to caress But failure is so easy to claim, it’s less a matter of Icarus falling into the sea than the boy canon-balling in the swimming pool Which is forbidden for a reason As a young boy, I was ashamed of my body, and I insert this detail just to personalise the dryness of the problem that I’m presenting, which is how to make a poem touch a person? How can you guarantee, with the only things you have to work with, what poets over-generally call form, that you can move someone? It can’t be by self-exposure, or maybe it can, but I can’t do that I looked over at you reading in the library before we really touched each other, and continued to think about the ways a poem might somehow not reproduce the logic of late capitalism So many years down the line, the distance is so much larger; I thought that everything was a love poem, provided that it collapsed I thought it was the single frozen moment of the splash that we apprehend after the fact and remember as beautiful It was you who made me feel the inadequacy of my justifications, that I had expected that failing to love you would be easy

Prize Entry

November 2018

From 'Head Sonnets'

Hugh Foley

Prize Entry

November 2018

On some level, I’m sure, every poem is a failure. A lot of theory says as much, and I...

1 Modotti, Adrienne Rich I am struck by the line If this is where I must look for you, then this is where I’ll find you I read it several times, scrawl it on a note and stick it to the wall In the seminar that week I mention the poem but no one else has read it, so the burden falls upon me to describe it, explain (unpack, as the tutor creatively says) why it is emotionally striking, and why in particular it was so significant to me Certainly I do not mention that we are, in fact, A It is the week of epitaphs and as the dead rise I am trying to put you to rest To call you a ghost is ungenerous, it is not your fault I am haunted I have been told I can trace your face through mine and so I have sought and found you, every now and again, in the fold of my eyelids, the curl of my lip and the bump of my nose December is the cruellest month, I whisper to my room, gazing at the mirror, fingertip on nose curve I have told no one that we are rapidly approaching the fifth anniversary of your death, or that this week is hell for   anyone who has experienced grief Instead I posit (tutor’s word, not mine) that reading it-self is an act of resurrection Should we abide by the notion that the text is the vi-brant and living space between reader and writer, then of course to read an epitaph, to engage in memorial, is to summon the ghost subject and renew its life Quick note in the corner of my sheet: Write about her We progress through assigned reading, onto Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction We take it at face value initially, discuss our thoughts on art, then eventually begin to apply it to our epitaphs The word aura gains a spectral

Poetry

November 2018

Ways of Reading I

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

Poetry

November 2018

rapidly approaching the fifth anniversary of your death, or that this week is hell for   this is the...

We did not know it would leave us here Our sun sits bored as a dog at noon, gnawing the rocks   No stir, no From here, the earth might as well be flat – this eye its centre, this stone heart its own, all   horizons one drop down and off I am not yet a parvenu; ideas, like books, cannot   content me There is no fact much further than the reach of an arm – desperate, dislocated   This old tongue is dried to the bone I hate the sun, that attrition of seen things, which comes home safe and sound  

Prize Entry

November 2018

Littoral

Hal Coase

Prize Entry

November 2018

We did not know it would leave us here. Our sun sits bored as a dog at noon, gnawing...

before, we were all girls then it changed then there was Eve then there was Madonna   heaven help me then there was shame, torn blue robes how old were you when you lost your body?   when you knew it was not your own to name? we tried Alice, Dorothy, Lolita we tried boy-child   some were thrown bare-chested some were thrown on a wheel we tried Catherine we tried manhood   do you remember running naked in the long grass? do you remember when it rained, thinking it rained   all over the world? kiss me baby when we were girls we were very small then we became bigger than ever   we became larger than life standing in the storm in a ripped tuxedo, standing on hot sand in cleaved gowns   can you remember which ribs are false? which ones are true?

Prize Entry

November 2018

Material Girl

Eloise Hendy

Prize Entry

November 2018

before, we were all girls. then it changed. then there was Eve. then there was Madonna.   heaven help...

After Carrie Mae Weems ‘The Kitchen Table Series’   Hands placed just so, I instructed the mirror to document transformation – becoming my mother with nothing more than a gesture and the sheen of bright red gloss Who knew ten years later, I’d avoid mirrors that threw her in my face Did I say all mirrors? Except I was crashing them against concrete Finding the most triangular edge Digging the earth of my body for a reflection I could believe Hospital windows wouldn’t break I’d know That was a long time ago Different time Today my mother’s hands are a constant shiver I stand behind her Frame her hands in mine and pull the lipstick across The mirror looks at us I don’t break it I don’t avoid her eyes staring from my face and hers at the same time How could I? I’ve now lived long enough to know what it took to be her

Prize Entry

November 2018

Locating Strong Woman I

Tolu Agbelusi

Prize Entry

November 2018

After Carrie Mae Weems ‘The Kitchen Table Series’   Hands placed just so, I instructed the mirror to document...

we collected together all of the scientists and historians & i said okay, how about him he was a murderer – but it’s a photograph sun in his eyes how many decades since he tried it on? we tried it on,   did we? we wouldn’t do it, she said & we took lifts from vans on longwall street, pulled our tights up from the waist, snacked outside libraries – we needed headrushes to break our reading   we salute you from new college’s slippery mound where we climbed to escape the tourists & their guidebooks, laughing at their own hands we salute you & your endeavours noli me tangere, i am flying i am flayed today – there are exams & it is a good rotten apple summer, i think we bit away the shade   i spent so long reading reprinted old books that when i read the new ones you told me about they said oxford’s problem is all the women   who won’t fuck you – i thought that’s interesting baby, did i make you sick? the minstrels strummed & we thumbed back through the pages – margins full of us this one’s about anne boleyn & this one is about wild game the rhyme – it’s so quiet noli me tangere, is it my right to say that? i didn’t like my legs but didn’t know what to wear in case you saw them   & we spent lunches stuck on dead princes’ faces this is not what you’re like you only want to sing about how much you love us anyway
bangable dudes in history

Prize Entry

November 2018

Charlotte Geater

From a past life I am warning you that I have come into my grand unified theory My cheeks are swollen, my tongue changed, I know every dirty bruise on me hides a windrose or hydrangea The latest moon outlives us I have faith in its flood of electrical slogans I dreamt the bodies irradiated that terminal hall like a few violets in the mud; via the glass, the violent view, a military jet blooms its buds I did not mind so much the dreaming, and yet I still desired to make my way over, to cross in to your threshold Under the departure screen I slept so the numbers would not see me I was just an avatar in the prayer room resting or resurrecting Who still remembers the Nabateans? The queue was over After the drones, life after life, the heritages were in danger I folded myself with the headlines so that I would have nothing to declare Believe me when I tell you this:   > I was not going to kill anybody / I was undecided / I pressed the buttons to check myself in / I lived it / I escaped it

Prize Entry

November 2018

The Last Life

Jay G Ying

Prize Entry

November 2018

From a past life I am warning you that I have come into my grand unified theory. My cheeks...

When she comes home there is no fanfare, no bank holiday Still, the sun shines in all seasons She is greeted with light, dry winds, the fresh fruits of December ‘What citrus’, Father asks, ‘can compare to the citrus of Orange County? O foolish daughter, what winters you have missed!’ On her first night they serve a meal of fish and aubergines and ask her to recite the details of her Grand Adventure But Mother interrupts: ‘O dear, how false you are! How altered! How can you speak that phoney English?’ She will not say that she too has found things altered, things that only a prodigal daughter can detect – the sad upholstery, a lock that sticks, less green in the garden, Sister’s bad new fringe Though still so far away from things, she knows the old love must be imminent; it must be home because she’s longed for it    

Prize Entry

November 2018

Eggplant

Caitlin Newby

Prize Entry

November 2018

When she comes home there is no fanfare, no bank holiday. Still, the sun shines in all seasons. She...
Three Poems

Poetry

November 2018

Gerard Coletta

Poetry

November 2018

Caciocavallo Podolico   I call up the man from Apulia to talk about how cheese is made from the milk of the Podolica cow....

 

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