Ange Mlinko

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...

When​ Harry Mathews died in Key West in 2017, just shy of his 87th birthday, he was remembered as the first American member of Oulipo, the expatriate author of several experimental novels: The Conversions (1962), Tlooth (1966), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975), Cigarettes (1987), The Journalist (1994) and My Life in CIA (2005). A final novel, The Solitary Twin, was published...

If you’re a poet, and also a philosopher of language who dotes on the real-world consequence of words, it comes as a shock that words have no bearing, finally, on death. ‘That you can’t edit.’ The great licentiousness of language lies in its counterfactuals: that is its source of invention, in play as well as villainy, but therein also lies Riley’s problem: she can be told her son is dead, she can say it to herself a hundred ways, but words are just that. It’s only with the continuation of his non-return that the fact sinks in.