Author: Sue Hall Pyke

Righteous anger tearing up the e-page. Teenage heroics on top of surviving. Respect. This is fiction, a Mississippi girl telling a New York story, but it reads truer than the news. Hardcopy ordered for a mid-teen change agent close to my heart.

Loving this until a student reminds me there are better ways of dealing with a loved one’s brain-shift into a different person. Not repayments, re-shaping love. The other students feel her pain, we all say amen. Again, I learn more than teach.

Got me wondering. I mean, who owns what part of this story? That scholarship fund best be getting the proceeds or I’ve been consuming ill-gotten gains. Oh, those cells you’ve donated or had tested? No longer yours. You too could be immortal.

More questions than answers. What’s a ‘fern-harvest’? Are wasps ‘impudent’ or privileged? Does kneeling together really do ‘no harm’? How to wear ‘pomegranate flowers’? And when (at last) might we listen alertly to speeches on ‘capital and labour and labour and capital’?

Nails, like me/us, sullied with scrabbling from those ‘dank and wretched’ (17) ditches that life creates. The expressiveness of jam stains, soaring shifts in syntax. I am the protagonist’s friend, I  put my loving hand on this book, declare myself ‘ensorcelled’ (151).

Political grace, comprehensively argued, to the songbook of Derrida, Foucault and Girard. Harmony with Adams, descant with Haraway. Depicts nonhuman resistance in prose that weeps. Inspired call for a move beyond sacrificial eating. A day of truce from killability, following Andrea Dworkin.

Pecking (new) order

99 titles a poem. 99 short furious flashes of fiction. Truths. 49. “One should not define God in human language” but rather descend “ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.” Then 73’s divine that stays away from the lonely world of humans.

Relational growth that illuminates ‘different levels of light’ and ‘dimensions’ (30) through the artworking of Australia’s first people in ‘an unstable world where the only thing you can definitively claim as your own is the country in which you were born’ (97).

An appreciation of synchrony and the necessity and treachery of witness beyond the ‘great monad’ of capital (69). The transformative energy of matter, in all ‘families’, including ‘mechanical, calorific, electrical, chemical, rays, nuclear’ and perhaps ‘spiritual’ (36). The matter of humans included.