I wondered what Gary did and why didn’t he want us to know his full name. It went quiet as though my listening was being listened to. I heard Gary behind the wall, opening drawers and sighing, closing drawers and sighing, grunting his throat clear. We didn’t know what he meant, Like music? Like a model railway? But you didn’t use Gary’s room as a workshop or studio, or even a gym, so you remained unfulfilled, coughing on my neck at night. He worked nights and when he first moved in said you could use his room to do something in. Then I guess he became huge and heavy once more. He went away drinking or climbing, he came back invisibly and snuck to his room. He must have come back from drinking or climbing. It was Gary, another tall guy who lived here. The kitchen wall had the ambience of a man’s body behind it. I heated up something starchy for the baby while it pulled out pots from the low cupboard. Thank you for not calling us animals –īack inside your bath carried on in silence but I wouldn’t call it peace. As long as it’s inside the house, anyway. I honestly think I could create love with anything or anyone at any given moment. You should have seen me with it a moment ago, we were dancing and there was a very loving and brand-new body heat between us. I’m going to go inside and take care of it now. Think of us more like spiritual movements, or swerves of undecided time, maybe just actors. You must find the ungracious groans and roars really disturbing, especially as there’s three of us. We’d be quieter if it wasn’t so boring all the time. I’m sorry for the noise you must hate living next-door to us. I yanked the radio’s plug from the socket then ran out of the house to shout up at the neighbour’s window – Somewhere in my screams I could hear the reason because the neighbours, because the neighbours will hear the radio. I should have been glad to have you home, at arms-length, but instead of relaxing on the sofa with my legs swung up the wall I found myself pounding on the bathroom door and screaming at you to turn the radio down. You thudded, undressed and whistled like a sailor. You dragged the radio upstairs by its cord to listen to a loud news programme in the bath. The smell of oysters made me feel sick and it bothered you irrationally that I wouldn’t thank you for them. It would be an hour or two until the house was comfortable and at last the night. The door banged shut and at being banged shut an atmosphere ended. Today is Friday, I spoke-sang and jigged. ![]() I took the baby to the window to look at the cat. You passed the baby straight to me so you could speak to Carl about the outlaw roadworkers who you thought were heroes, but Carl thought were unprincipled. Carl worried about the fumes from his home distillery so liked to give its lungs a break, and looking after something so explicitly helped us not get confused about how to live. I had two feelings in conversation with each other, I’m expecting a lot from tonight and I wouldn’t if I were you.Īs soon as you sat down someone knocked so you went back to the door both of us had forgotten that your friend Carl lent us his baby at the weekends. I had been thinking about you all day, happily at first, but after lunch my thoughts went bad and found images of you with other, willowier women and I’d conjured the hurtful things you had said to me on car journeys, so by the time you were back I felt betrayed, a little nail-polished, and hated you. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.That Friday it was 4.30 in the afternoon when you came home unexpectedly early with one plastic bag full of oysters and one full of beer to celebrate another house being turfed up by the outlaw roadworkers. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. ![]() Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act.
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