Ange Mlinko

Lydia Davis​ is big on lists. In her early short story ‘Break It Down’, the unnamed narrator attempts to balance financial and emotional ledgers in the aftermath of a love affair:

I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days. Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say,...

I like – don’t you? – that it has an insect tattooedin its sanctum sanctorum, a suitor’s pseud.That’s one aspect of its ghostliness, its moon-tones,its utter prescience, not to mention cojones.For if those speckles don’t answer to the footprintsof insects tramping through the moondustof its pollen, I don’t know what its six headdressesare for, or what...

Adrienne Rich’s​ poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist (dating from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:

at your tabletelephone ringsevery four minutestalkof terrible thingsthe papers bringingno good news       ...

‘Couples can wed at the Miami Zoo …’She is laughing to her confessor,a tightswathed, foiling hairdresser(whose biceps playing peekaboo,

as he parts and lifts and snips,suggest the weight of the flattening ironor the tensility in the ringlets of that sirenchatting about her ‘upcoming trips’).

Zoe, meanwhile, creases my headdress,also of foil, in which I look,arrayed...

Lilia Imbody​ (née Liska), ‘from Benicia, California’, is the resident curmudgeon at Bayside Garden retirement community: ‘anyone sitting next to her fell into the category of the unwelcome.’ She’s also a specialist in mordant wisecracks:

Jane was complaining this morning that all she could remember were the things before she turned ten and after she turned...