"Terms and Conditions" by Tania Hershman (Nine Arches Press, 2017)

Poems from "The Rialto", "Under the Radar", "BBC Radio 3", etc. Certain "New Scientist" articles are acknowledged as providing inspiration. The book's in 3 sections with broad themes - "data collection" (observing), "warranties & disclaimers" (miss/interpreting), and "privacy policy" (personal responses). I liked several poems near the start, e.g. "Advice for the traveller" and "What do we do when the water rises", the latter an extended metaphor introduced by the title. The body of the poem's all about fire ants' collective response to water. Starting at p.22 (mostly in the middle section) there's a clutch of poems that I had some trouble with, for various reasons -

• They make a good point (or have a good image), but the rest of the poem doesn't provide enough support - p.22, p.36 (which uses very short lines, some indented), p.48, p.50 (double-spaced, gappy)
• They seem slow, or don't make enough of a point, though they sometimes use double-spaced short lines, or other typesetting FX - p.24, p.28, p.33, p.38, p.46, p.61 (makes a worthy point, but is it worth a page to say?)
• They puzzle me - p.34 (My understanding of the poem is that corals were thought by scientists to be damaged by acidic water, yet they do ok if the acidity is caused by themselves. An analogy is made between this and the assumptions made by the persona missing "you". I like that, but what are the "questions"?), p.35, p.37

After about p.50 I start liking most of the poems again ("Body", "Getting away with it", etc). Interestingly, "What is it that fills us" appears in a slightly extended version in her recent prose collection "Some of us glow more than others" (Unthank Books). "What the choreographer knows about flight" feels like prose. This isn't meant as an aesthetic judgement. Roughly I'd suggest to reader-friendly writers that -

1. If the line-breaks (or come to that other features/words) are doing little or nothing, leave them out, especially if there's a risk that they might look like an attempt to divert attention from content
2. If the context might make readers skim over a text that would reward careful reading, it might be worth adding line-breaks as a hint that a different reading strategy is recommended. In this situation a common ploy is to make each stanza into a similarly sized rectangle to show that the particular positioning of the line-breaks doesn't much matter.

"What the choreographer ..." doesn't require exposure to the linguistic substrate, nor does it use any features that characterise poetry. So what are the line-breaks for?

Contrasting techniques are in evidence. "Happiness" is one of the most approachable pieces, which should go down well with audiences - happiness is compared to paint (industrial scale, not artists' little tubes). In contrast, "What we don't know we do not know" is very much a page poem. Some poems have no word-play, but "After you go" has ample - "forks" could be utensils or decisions; "I wipe counters" could allude to kitchen surfaces or resetting dials to zero; "love" could be emotion or zero. There's frequent use of rhetorical repetition. On p.62 for example, "I am the bird at the bottom" appears 4 times (28 words out of 88), an instance that works for me.

Seeking trends in such a varied book is a mug's game, so I'll suggest that gravity has an influence. There's a lot of weight, falling, catching, slipping and sagging. There are goings on under birds, cows, and Pompeii. Bird imagery representing freedom of a sort is frequent in her prose book, but not very common here.

Favourites that I've not already singled out include "Interview with a wind turbine", "Mirrors must not be", and "Pompeii" (except for the indents), and there are many appealing lines/ideas.

Other reviews

• Bidisha (Whether in prose or free verse, Hershman’s writing combines a clear style and witty observations with sinister, often symbolic plot developments ... the poems in Terms and Conditions read not as plaintive first-person confessionals but as fresh, almost journalistic pieces, full of humour and brisk observation.)
• James Roderick Burns (Hershman is never content to settle simply for quality, the arresting phrase or abiding image; always there comes a deeper questing, a probing, even ... The book overall is a tour de force of uncertainty, explored. I)
• Peter Raynard
• Matthew Stewart (Once more, line endings are key to an understanding of this poem ... Tania Hershman’s first full collection is characterised by the deft way she works through her relationship with life, always implicating and involving the reader in that process. By acknowledging that life is packed with tensions and opposites, by accepting and embracing their juxtaposition and coexistence, she’s able to renegotiate her own terms and conditions)

"Some of us glow more than others" by Tania Hershman (Unthank books, 2017)

This book has about 40 pieces taking up roughly 150 pages. They're nearly all narrative, edging into vignette but never essay. The shortest piece is less than half a page. The acknowledgements last for 3 pages, mentioning Ambit, Bare Fiction, Nature, New Scientist, Stinging Fly, "The Verb" (BBC R3), etc.

I follow Tania Hershman's career with interest. At one point I thought I might be able to use her as a role model - she's a science-trained writer. But then she engaged warp drive, got a Ph.D in literature, and all hope of my catching up with her disappeared. She writes poetry too - unsurprising given the exploratory nature of her Flash. She's been a writer-in-residence in science establishments, and quite a few of the pieces involve science in some way, bio-fluorescence in particular featuring. When the result is SF it's of the Kazuo Ishiguro or Margaret Atwood variety. Opportunistic affairs seem common in labs. In "Experimentation" the scientific method and dating intermix.

Individuals are sometimes subsumed into types - phrases like "The scientists" and "the young scientist" are common. It's after all how society views individuals who introduce themselves as scientists. People who introduce themselves as "poets" are pigeon-holed just as much I think. The scientists come in different varieties. In "The Party" the biochemists seem to feel inadequate amongst physicists and mathematicians. They're asked "Please … give us some? Some of your words? Your biochemistry words!" And they do - "lymphocyte", "organelle", "lamellipodia and especially, "Green Fluorescent Protein" - which pleases the physicists and mathematicians. In "God Glows" Emmylene, who used to be a physicist, loves "lymphocyte", "organelle", "lamellipodia and especially, "Green Fluorescent Protein" too. Emmylene thinks herself strange.

I might be the target audience for this book. I chat to post-docs at work - moving from contract to contract (and often country to country) they're a different breed to established staff and post-grads. I've a medical statistician in the family who helps runs cancer trials and is caught in statistics vs individual-case dilemmas. There's little here about conflicts between the scientific outlook and other approaches, except perhaps in "Hold the baby". Some of the characters struggle with technology, but don't we all. The focus is on people, and scientists can do other things than science -

• In "There is no-one in the lab tonight but mice" "instead of experiments, the scientists are doing art, playing music, meeting in coffee shops to talk poetry"
• In "The House of Meat" Ellen says "I've had it with bloody science. I'm going to retrain"

There's compression and imagery galore, e.g. -

• "It begins with watching birds, in the trees, and in its middle, later, there is a kitchen, and the woman stands, the teakettle's small hard tears of water dripping onto her fingers" (p.4)
• "I was the bird then, and you were in the chair" (p.143)
• "Carly is a lonely child, time wandering through her like insects, and it scatters, like beetles surprised, whenever she is spoken to" (p.90)
• "If kissed by a dragonfish, do not bite. If kissed by a dragonfish, make sure you are sitting" (p.143)

Bird imagery is frequent, and it's central to several pieces. There are encounters with unknowable others - people puzzled by people, people empathising with octopi. More generally people look to the elements of air and water for transcendence.

In "Burrowing Blind" a dead metaphor is revived - spies are blinded to become "moles". They burrow, doing underground work. Readers don't know whether the spies were operated on, or whether the blindness is symbolic. Other stories mention taking metaphors literally - "And What if Your Blood Ran Cold", for example. Sometimes there are more quirky deformations of standard usage - "A bad lie, she says, outbreathing" (p.5). In "And what if all your blood ran cold", alignment is used to show the passage's PoV. "The Plan or You Must Remember This" has 10 sections presented in reverse order.

One advantage of writing short pieces is that you can take more risks - if one story fails with a particular reader there are always other stories and readers. Some pieces puzzled me, in a "so what?" rather than meta-fictional way - "Tunnelling", "Empty Too", "The Perfect Egg", "A shower of curates". The pieces on p.74-83 didn't work for me. I didn't like "God glows" either. I liked "War Games", "Special Advisor", "There is no-one in the lab tonight but mice", "We are all made of protein but some of us glow more than others" (the top of p.116 in particular), and "Octopus Garden" with its surprising, satisfying finish. "The House of meat" certainly has its moments.

The title piece contains many of the themes and devices used in the other stories. Readers have to weave together the back-story from episodes that jump back and forwards in time. It begins with a son showing his mother Sarah a beating fish heart under a microscope. Then a young scientist works with jellyfish. He wonders why they glow. Sarah, on the shore, is watching the young scientist lying in a rowing boat. Another man, in another time studies worms. A boy takes schoolgirl Sarah to a movie - her first date. Simon thinks about his son and daughter. Simon takes Sarah to a movie - their first date. Sarah's "skin is tingling and in her stomach is a glow". Sarah has a job cutting jellyfish. The young scientist has made a discovery. Sarah is pregnant. Her husband isn't Simon. The man who thinks only of worms succeeds with his glowing worm experiment. Sarah (now a mother) paints "silently luminous" pieces that she sells. She sees Simon and jellyfish on TV - "they show the pictures, little green glowing cells". Shouldn't "PH" on p.120 be "pH"?

Other reviews

• Alan McCormick (Like all truly original ambitious books that I’ve loved and savoured, there are some parts I don’t get or respond to ... I found myself thinking of Barthelme, Borges and Lydia Davis in the wit, brevity and range of the stories, of Atwood in the disturbing science fictions, but Tania Hershman’s voice and vision is all her own.)
• Richard T. Watson (The prose is taut and tight, whipping along and leaving the reader to catch up in its wake – or not, as the case may be (some, like ‘Tunnelling’ could do with a few more words, and being a bit less oblique, for my taste). ... Like ‘Biography (Ongoing)’, ‘Burrowing Blind’ is admirable in its epic scope and brevity.)
• skylightrain (unmistakable blend of the poetic, the uncanny and the deeply human ... Hershman explores our predilections and imperfections with effortless eloquence. ... A little beyond the central pages of the collection hovers the story There Is No-One In The Lab Tonight But Mice. On the surface it seems whimsical – a playful fantasy – but here we find the heart of Hershman’s curiosity, and a perfect truth that curls between the lines in many of the pieces here.)
• Rupert Dastur (The reader is afforded a glimpse into a world usually hidden by closed doors, technical language, and spreadsheet models. Hershman lights upon some of this mystery and discovery, delighting in the sensuality and playfulness of scientific syntax, while also acknowledging the tedious reality of repetition after repetition that is so necessary to research. Two of my favourite short stories in this collection, ‘And What if Your Blood Ran Cold’ and ‘The House of Meat’ aptly explore these concerns ... Both stories step along the difficult lines of co-worker relationships (the driving force in most of these short fictions) ... Other short stories which I particularly enjoyed – ‘The Special Advisor’ and ‘Octopus’s Garden’ – deal with death, contain same-sex-relationships, and circle around loneliness. ... ‘Flavours’ ... stuck with me for a particularly long time.)

"My Mother was an Upright Piano" by Tania Hershman (Tangent, 2012)

56 stories. The publications list is over 30 titles long, ("London Magazine", "Smokelong Quarterly", "Vestal Review", etc)! Compared to recent works by Jon McGregor and Lydia Davis, there's much more uniformity of length and style. There are usually characters. There's no linguistic instability (language is transparent). The pieces are clearly Fiction rather than essays (p.93 excepted) or lists (p.125 excepted). The shortest story's about half a page and the longest is 4 pages. Median is around 300 words, I suspect (in contrast, her earlier The White Road and other stories had a story 102 words long, and stories thousands of words long). There's often a 3-part structure, and the SF guideline of changing only one feature of reality (or conventionality) at a time is commonly adhered to. Stories are presented in bunches of about 6.

• I liked: "the short tree has its hand up", "trams and pies", "forty-eight dogs", "underground", "waving on the moon", "if", "containing art"
• Interesting were: "move quickly now", "the angle of his bending", "let's toast this thing".
• My least favourite was: "the painter and the physicist", though "missy" came close because of its predictability.

In this context the language sounds too strained at times

• "I remember now a piece of night when he was with us" (p.44)
• "I turn sharp as nails to catch you inside a moment" (p.46)

Other reviews

• good reads
• Kerri Shadid (World Literature Today) (Hershman shows us that our world is, in fact, a nearly unrecognizable place, and we are all aliens in it, alien in our skin, unknowable not only to each other but often to ourselves ... Everything is not illuminated in Hershman’s storytelling, and the reader may well ask himself at the end of a story, “What just happened?” The answer: something vague, absurd, the pain of our attempts at human relationships, and our tenuous place in the universe revealing themselves, and they are beautiful.)
• Michelle Bailat-Jones (Necessary Fiction) (The diversity of subject on offer in the collection is brilliant, but what really impresses is how Hershman succeeds in establishing longer, more complicated narratives within each short piece. ... Despite the variety of subject and even the varying directions of experiment that Hershman follows, the pieces speak to one another through their innovative and unusual way of looking at and re-imagining the world.)
• Martin Macaulay (Sabotage reviews) (It’s a solid, unbreakable and inspiring collection. ... Hershman pulls you in to these beautifully condensed fictions. The difficulty is in trying to climb back out again)
• Bookmunch (Getting the opening right is one of the big challenges of short form writing, and it’s one of Hershman’s real strengths. ... This is strong and assured writing, which demands your attention)
• Jonathan Pinnock (the work of a grown-up writer who has gained the confidence to let her muse off the leash and to follow it wherever it goes, however unexpected that turns out to be)

"The White Road and Other Stories" by Tania Hershman (Salt, 2008)

I looked first at the 2 pages of acknowledgements. I too raid "New Scientist". I too have been in "Transmission" but never on BBC Radio 4. At least 14 of these 27 pieces are Flash (102 words is I think the shortest) and the others, by being set against the Flash, risk being accused of lacking intensity or not exploiting the possibilities afforded by the extra length (up to 12 pages), so bear with me while I digress about Flash.

Evolution's mutation and natural selection leads to several effects, amongst which are combination, dwarfism/gigantism (part or all of the organism changing size) and neotony (the retention of juvenile characteristics - humans are part-neotonic apes). Genres in the Arts can develop similarly. Before the neotony of Impressionism, artists wouldn't try to pass off their on-the-spot paintings as finished versions, even if those sketches captured the essence of the experience. Though Flash didn't evolve from 2000-word stories or free verse - it pre-dates those by centuries - it's inevitably compared with them. Some Flash focuses on a particular short story feature - epiphany-gigantism, for example - whereas others try to be a miniature, perfectly scaled version of a short story. How do the Flash pieces in this book compare?

• "Mugs" successfully introduces 2 characters, a scenario, and an epiphany. It's not just a sketch towards a painting, it more like how masters used to work in art studios - doing the face and hands, leaving the rest to the apprentices (in this case the readers). It works well, and doesn't need padding into story-sized prose.
• "Drizzling" is my favourite piece in the book, a short story in miniature with a final kick.
• "Heart" effectively combines two images
• "Hand" could easily pass as poetry

Some of the rest save space by being lo-res, fuzzy, or faded. They don't have the initial impenetrability of an autostereogram followed by a "Wow", or that mysterious flatness of a hologram that only reveals its depth when the reader changes viewpoint - not for this reader anyway. They don't magnify a particular aspect of story-writing, or elegize a significant moment. I'm not suggesting that any Flash that transcends my makeshift taxomony is necessarily bad, but if evolution leads to less complexity, the offspring should at least be ideally suited to its habitat. "Heavy Bones" - so what?

Now onto the longer stories. "White Road" has a first person voice (it's been on BBC Radio 4) belonging to the owner of the last cafe before the South Pole. It has innocent phrases with hidden depths - "The road don't cut through it, it's part of it, just flattened out a bit". The ending's a surprise - a dramatic physical event whose timing has no obvious psychological justification. It works for me though, and it's prefigured earlier in the story. It's not the only story about blindness (and preparing for it) or about cold climes, or childbirth problems. Of course, snow doesn't really cause permanent blindness, but the character wants to be blind, and prepares accordingly - "Some things the eye shouldn't see". It could have a symbolic meaning - Death, Dementia, Madness, or most likely the desire to Forget.

"White Road" begins the book. The final story is, neatly, "North Cold" which I've read before in "Riptide". I guess it could be classified as magic realism. I like that too, and "Rainstiffness", which ends particularly well. They're 2 of the stories where it's as if weather corresponds to some internal state.

I'm not so convinced by the "Brewing Storm", "Evie and the Arfids", and "Space Fright" stories. All include near-future technology and some light comedy. The endings of the first 2 are predictable, but I don't really get what the pieces are trying to be. The plots and character studies don't cut it for me, and I can't read them as satire or social comment - they suffer too much in comparison to some other pieces here.

In a story with a title like "Self Raising" one expects double meanings, and we're not disappointed. Cake making is mentioned, and we're given some Science, but what's the connection? We're soon told - the narrator's an under-achieving science-graduate widow, self-employed making themed cakes. The story's last paragraph's a surprise though - again, there's a dramatic event (involving an open window rather than breaking a glass ceiling) without an obvious internal analogue. Something snapped, but why does the internal monologue go suspiciously quiet at the crucial moment? It's a story convention, but all the same.

"Sunspots" exemplifies most clearly the author's ability to speak in voices - it has a believable medieval setting. The voices aren't exclusively female either, and a discursive tone's sometimes adopted - "Express" looks like an essay set in the 2nd person. The material's promising - with a more pressing side-plot it could have been a conventional story. "The Incredible Exploding Victor" is fun idea with a tame conclusion (the characters suddenly acting like grown-ups when "the doctor" intercedes) - so tame I wonder what I've missed. I prefer stories that become pretentious when they fail, rather than fizzle away.

Maybe alternating the long and short pieces wasn't a good idea. I feel that all the required components of stories are in the book, but rarely together in a single piece. To continue the evolution analogies (see "New Scientist", 30th Aug 2008 for details) it's as if the book were a soupy Virosphere with left-over fragments that could be recombined with the larger units to accelerate evolution. The contents needs another shake, more cross-infection, more survival of the fittest.

Surprisingly for a Salt publication there were typos - p.23 has "working it's way", and p.43 has "a annoying".

Other reviews

• David Hebblethwaite