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Letters From Lockdown 73: Cassidy Harvard-Davies
Dear Far-Flung Friends…
Ali Smith’s ‘Girl Meets Boy’
I will start this review with a slight disclaimer: I ADORE Ali Smith and she is one of my all time favourite authors. This isn’t indicative of my own enjoyment (which was ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️!!) but how I felt it read as a text and how much I would recommend it to others. On to the review!
I greatly enjoyed Smith’s modern take on Ovid’s myth of Iphis as a discursive discussion on gender. She tackles homophobia and corporate politics amidst her typical humour interwoven with a lovely narrative of love in a small Scottish town. Her use of parentheses and flashbacks result in an immersive experience that we expect from Smith; her portrayal of Robin, or Iphisol, is gripping and likeable. While the protagonist, Anthea, could have been written as unlikeable and stringent, she is the opposite, and acts as a gateway into Smith’s discussion of fluidity in love and gender, echoed in the ‘Pure’ water company she works for.
However: her beautiful prose can be seen as somewhat inaccessible to a casual reader, which is one of the only reasons why this novel loses one and a half stars. The other, as I tend to find with Smith’s works, is that I am left wanting more than its 161 pages. The eccentric grandparents who open and close the novel, who sail off to sea and never return, act as a framework rather than beloved characters they could grow to be.
Nevertheless, Smith’s characters are fallible and loveable, and combined with her poetic voice, Girl meets boy is a beautiful retelling that perhaps could benefit from more context. But then, arguably, it wouldn’t be an Ali Smith novel – short but sweet, with an important message and immersive prose.
some nights…
some nights
Todd Moore, ‘burning’
i sleep in
fire i always
And now…
And now, each night I count the stars,
Amiri Baraka, ‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Why Now Was the Perfect Time for Taylor Swift’s Folklore
You remember…
You remember too much,
Anne Carson, ‘Glass, Irony and God’
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
I look at…
I look at my own body
Langston Hughes, ‘I look at the world’
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Will she…
Will she make it through?
Patricia Smith, ‘Black, Poured Directly into the Wound’
Is this how the face slap of sorrow changes the shape of a
mother? All the boys she sees now are laughing, drenched in red.