"This Lexia & other languages" by Helen Kay (V.press, 2020)

Dyslexia (punned in the title) is a theme in this booklet of poems from "The Rialto", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "The Interpreter's House", "Orbis", etc. There are 3 sections - "Personal Effects", "Symptoms", and "And Other Languages".

The underlying difficulties emerge as surface disruption with varying severity - sometimes as surprising metaphors, sometimes as broken syntax, rarely in layout. There's quite a wide range of styles (about a quarter of the poems are end-rhymed) which might be tiring were there an unrestricted set of themes. Sometimes plain content suffices to convey the emotion - more often felt by the dyslexic person's companion. "The Drama Student's Live Art Hit" didn't need the poetic twist at the end.

Sometimes the shape of written language is the focus of attention - "a murmuration of marks ... the dangling hooks of 'f's and 't's ... 'b' and 'd' stopped turning their backs on each other in bed.

Here are some extracts -

• "you did not crawl since left and right/ were stillborn words on planet you" (p.5)
• "In the street, he stutters on the kerb's teeth./ Uneven pavements dribble him away" (p.9)
• "Next day fills with    Mrs Malaprop;/ whotsit pen drives    brillig crib sheets" (p.12)
• "Behind her smile, she despaired how words/ shut off the boy from who he was" (p.13)
• "The time between know it and say it/ splits open. I sleep beneath a sheet/ of crumpled plans. The clock's claw-sharp/ hands slit a fleeing hour by the throat" (p.17)
• "Y? must dey mention my detentions,/ Noz bleed, leaky pen, lost attn?/ Sir z my hed wz a washn mchne,/ bt he nvr waits 4 the door 2 cliK (p.22)

Other reviews

• Matthew Paul (One virtue of pamphlets is that a theme can be creatively sustained across twenty-odd poems in a way which might become wearing in a full collection. ... If one point of poetry is to present, in a fresh manner, a diversity of experience that many (or most) readers probably won’t have experienced themselves, then this pamphlet does just that.)

"checkout" by Kathy Gee (V.press, 2019)

A pamphlet of poems from Antiphon, The High Window, The Lake, etc. In the preface, the poet writes that the pamphlet "combines elements of flash fiction, poetry and radio play" with "two strands of inner speech, linked only by their presence in the same place. The narrator is a young shop assistant ... Her voice is a sequence of metric prose poems, each precisely 100 words long. These always mention a second, 'customer', voice, which takes the form best suited to that particular character."

Each page starts with some prose (I wouldn't call them prose poems, and I think they're only "metric" in the sense that they're 100 words long). Each time we learn a little more about the protagonist (pregnant before 18, chucked out of school), and about the character (or dog) who features in the poem. Several of the characters are her ex-teachers, or post-depression, or dying, or caring for the ill. It took me a while to get used to the pacing - some of the poetry sections are prose with line-breaks, more prosey than the prose. By the end we have a panoramic view of life as she sees it, and we glimpse at her hopes.

Other reviews

• Lisa Williams (Each drabble introduces another customer and there’s a natural flow as each new voice enters, so much so you can almost hear the tinkle of the bell above the door.)
• Rennie Halstead (By the end of the pamphlet, we have developed a clear idea of Nona’s personality and desires. Left pregnant as a school girl, the shop is the only work she can find. However, she has ambitions to become a nurse and, by the end of the pamphlet, sets off to encourage her friend Emma to enrol with her, hoping Gran will mind baby Freddie in the school holidays.)

"A Z-hearted guide to heartache" by Charley Barnes (V.press, 2018)

A pamphlet of poems by a woman with a PhD in Creative Writing. I don't get the title.

All the poems convey something, and they would all work live - indeed, I think many of them would go down excellently at readings. I'm not so sure they work together in a pamphlet though - the structures become recognisable. Poems (but are they poems?) like "Tips to fix a depressed person", "An apology for not looking disabled" and "A pocket-sized guide to hurting yourself" do little for me - I've seen much of the content before in how-to lists, and the rendition is rather listy too.

In "My therapist says", the narrator tells her/his therapist that they don't want to be the sort of person who starts sentences with "My therapist says" but that's how they start sentences with their partner to legitimise their claims. They're writing on walls again because there are important things to say. That's the prose summary - does the page-long poem say enough more? Among poems by other people it might stand out. Here the surrounding poems dilute its effect.

Some other poems are extended metaphors using a restricted (or "thematic" if you prefer) palette of themes. Reading the first few lines you can brainstorm, predicting rather too successfully what might come next, having trained yourself on previous poems.

Other reviews

• Emma Lee (“A Z-hearted Guide to Heartache” isn’t just a gentle wallow in post-heartbreak territory ... One poem, although making an important point, feels out of synch with the theme and subject of most of the poems. “An apology for not looking disabled,” ... It makes a vital point and is a good poem but doesn’t sit as well as, “Food is an important part of any relationship – Part Three” ... The situations appear specific to a certain relationship [] yet illustrate scenarios that are universally recognisable.)
• Daniel Burton

"The missing hours" by Julia Dahl

An audio book

Claudia wakes in her student dorm room, not recalling how she got there. She's had sex. Trevor down the corridor helps her. Her sister Edie (wife of Nathan) gives birth on the same morning. Their parents Gabriel and Michelle have newly divorced. Each is rich.

A video of her is circulated, her having sex with Chad and Jeremy. Edie had an affair with Chad's father Ridley. She had an abortion. Michelle is having an affair. Ridley offers various people money to hush things up.

Claudia shares accommodation with Whitney, who Trevor is dumping.

Claudia disappears. $50k goes out of her account. She pays a girl $5k to drug Chad with Ketamin and get him to her hotel room. She decides to humiliate him rather than frame or kill him. She gets Trevor to maim Jeremy, a promising musician, but the assault ends up being life-threatening. She offers Trevor $2k for his help - no love interest.

[Each chapter is from a named third-person PoV. The story switches between timelines more than I expected. The set-up isn't subtle - there's a rich victim against a strong lawyer who's slept with the victim's sister and mother. Reputation, money and physical damage are the weapons.They're not used subtley either - or surprisingly. It's no surprise that the new baby doesn't feature much. I liked "looked at him as if he'd just sung offkey"]

Other reviews

• pecheyponderings (Backstories and development occurred in equal measure throughout, keeping the reader attentive so as not to miss anything being offered.)
• goodreads (3.34 - 3,859 ratings, 681 reviews)

"Arch-Conspirator" by Veronica Roth

An audio book.

The world's radioactive. The population's dwindling. Women have to bear children though half the time they die. A starship, trireme, might be used if the population gets too low. Dead people's icor is stored in the archives. This must be used for reproduction because then the genes can be edited. When Oedipus (a leader) and Jocesta (a gene scientist) were killed, Creon took their children (Antigone and 2 boys) in. His son Haymon is betrothed to Antigone. Her brother Polynices gives her an extractor (to get icor). Next day he dies. Nobody's allow to collect his icor, but Haymon creates a diversion so that Antigone can try. She's caught. She insists on a public trial. She and Creon debate. She has to leave on trireme. Haymon sleeps with her on her last night. He goes to a rebel asking for the flight to be stopped. The rebel says that Creon must die.

Other reviews

• Angela Gualtieri (The significant events from the original remain, but Roth twists them to the benefit of a modern audience. She then layers them with impactful themes like the consequences of choice, familial love, female autonomy, and power. The story is told through multiple perspectives in first-person, allowing not only a greater attachment to what’s happening, but a fuller understanding of the differing opinions and motives of each character.)
• righterofwords (Considering how much of Antigone’s story is influenced by her parentage, it makes sense to have genetics a major factor in this version, and I think it was done well. Some of the details about how reproduction works here seemed a little murky, but it didn’t affect my comprehension of the overall story. That said, I don’t know that Kreon’s stance makes much sense here. Without going into specifics, he believes that Antigone and her siblings have no soul, and therefore there is no use in saving their genes. I’m not sure this makes sense, since obviously these people have an understanding of genetics, so I would think that having viable DNA and eggs/sperm in such a dire world would still be valuable, souls aside. But maybe I missed something. Speaking of Kreon, I think it was interesting that Roth changed him from being Jocasta’s brother to being Oedipus’.)
• thebookdutchesses (To me it seemed like there wasn’t that much world building, which makes some sense in a novella but I’ve seen it done a lot better than here. ... I get that the story was retelling of Antigone but I didn’t really like the plot but I especially disliked the ending.)
• Bill Capossere (The thematic underpinning, meanwhile, is densely layered, raising issues of personal agency (particular with women), bodily autonomy, family obligation, use (and abuse) of power, religion, the balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of the state, and more. Here, more than with regard to plot, is where I personally would have liked to see more development, where the form’s length works somewhat at odds with the narrative.)

"Universality" by Natasha Brown

An audio book.

There's an article written by Hannah about an event followed by some chapters about the key characters, where some details differ with those of the article. Richard Spenser works in London in the finance sector. He's separated from wife Clare and child. When his father died he bought a Yorkshire farm, getting Jake to run it. During lockdown squatters moved in. Jake hit the leader Pegasus with a gold ingot and went off with it.

Lenny (female) is a right-wing influencer - actually Jake's mother. She and Richard were the only ones left in their apartment block during lockdown. They'd had sex.

Hannah is with Martin, Gwen with John. They have an evening meal together, discussing algorithms, class, race, etc. Hannah has interviewed Lenny. Martin intends to. The farm incident is being dramatised - Jake will be black and his mother will be Spenser's housekeeper. Richard has formally complained about how Hannah has portrayed him.

Years before, when Richard's father was widowered and his construction business was struggling, Richard helped at the expense of being with Clare. He didn't want Clare's rich parents to bail them out.

Lenny's 2nd book, "Woke Capitalism", wasn't a simple follow-up to her first.

Can't see too much in it. You can't believe all you read it the papers.

Other reviews

• Alex Clarke (a fabulous fable about the politics of storytelling)
• readingwritingandme (The book takes risks in its unconventionality. Thirty-five percent of the novel is the feature itself which we're launched into without context, and it offers the majority of the story as it bounces between various players in the dramatic incident. There are times where I felt this dragged, and I wondered what the point would be in the wider novel. It turns out that this feature is largely the novel. What disappointed me, somewhat, was that the central focus of the feature, the anarchist group that was turning cult-like and the interpersonal problems that led to the assault, were all put entirely to the wayside when the book shifted course. Which, it does make sense for the project. The book is really a critique of the media ecosystem as a whole more than anything. And, in that way, Brown makes her artificial device almost too compelling because I found myself wanting to go deeper on the content of the piece itself rather than look at the machinations around it. This perfectly makes the point Brown is going for, but I feel like it's worth saying on the plane of novels being entertainment and having the dimension of reader experience that there is something of a letdown in that choice. The prose sections after the feature also felt technically weaker.)
• ontheprize (Crucially, the novel reveals that far from the purely political and contemporarily ‘symbolic’ crime that Hannah sets up in the article, there are far more personal motivations at play behind the scenes. ... It’s a book that his received fulsome praise from many quarters, with many a five star review and plaudits from respected sources and prizes aplenty. I have to confess that my immediate reaction to all of this was utter bemusement. ... The first third ... is lumberingly written, and didn’t grab my attention at all. Of course, this is soon revealed to have been something like “the point” ... My primary criticism is that the rest of the book, even as its structural ‘cleverness’ becomes apparent, lacks redeeming features ... Beyond that, what else is there? The characters are caricatures in service of the cleverness. It’s implied that the later sections of the book reveal hidden depths beyond the superficiality of the article, but do they really? ... I get the point (and did while reading) that Brown is deconstructing the simplistic narratives we are fed in the modern, highly polarised ‘Culture Wars’ landscape, and massively agree that this is a worthwhile endeavour. But isn’t it preaching to the converted? Don’t most readers of this kind of literary fiction understand inherently the false dichotomies being established and understand that the characters espousing them are often deeply compromised individuals with ties to the things they criticise and that their motivations aren’t exactly honourable? No?)

"The life she wants" by J.M. Hewitt

An audio book

Paula (mid-thirties) is married to increasingly rich Tommy. They have a 5 bedroom home. She wants a child. He's stalling. Her best friend Julie tells her to hurry up. When Tommy surprises Paula with an Arctic cruise he hints that he's ready for fatherhood.

Anna has overheard Paula's conversation with Julie. She is William's live-in carer. One day he brings home $18k in cash and says his son will arrive in a day or so from Spain. She pushes him downstairs and prepares a departure. She spends £6k to get the cabin next to Paula and Tommy. She tries and fails to kill Paula. She kills a crew member who suspects her.

We learn about a girl whose single mother bringing clients home. The girl tried locking her in her room until she kicked the habit but her supplier saved her. She won a scholarship to study at Edinburgh by swindling the only other candidate - Rebecca, a foster child. She was called back by the pusher when her mother died. She killed the pusher.

When Paula phones Julie, updating her on events, Julie tells Paula to be suspicious of Anna, who's gaslighting her and making her doubt Tommy. An indistinct photo of Anna appears online as a suspected murderer of William. The crew suspect her. On a daytrip Anna tells Paula about her murders then pushes she under the ice of a lake, throws away various incriminating things she's stolen, and returns to the ship. Paula escapes, collects the items, and returns to the ship to confront and kill Anna.

We learn - I think - that Paula is Rebecca

I'd assumed than the girl whose past we learn about was Anna but I was confused at the end - were it not an audio book I'd have turned back to work things out. The section when Paula escapes from under the ice (an unlikely event, giving the coldness of the water) and collects items is detailed without being interesting. The phrase "she smiled to herself" is used several times even when she's alone.

Other reviews

• tropicalgirlreadsbooks (the plot is too direct, not many twists and turns and is too predictable to me. ... The book was too slow and overall bland to me. The ending was OK to me.)
• Goodreads (an evaluation of 4.03 after 4,685 ratings. I'm surprised by both figures.)