The slaughterhouse work of this book, the ripping apart and the blood and the bones, pain so determinedly unheard, and yet here is the truth of ‘“murrispacetime”. Ears unplug. Cruelty, raw as it ever was. Glorious fleshy black humour: “scissors anchor pistol”.
‘How do I read this? How to read this now? How do you read this?’ (149). Carefully. Skin alert, horsing around, analysand/reader and analyst/reader jamming as ‘lady’ (158). ‘I read it over and over’ (149). ‘Memory is not a stable unit’ (47).
Grateful writing, collective thinking, trauma as a beingness of the body, as patterns of people doing life together. Always self-questioning, tentatively etching the ‘structures of feeling’ (97). Readers also called to be ill-at-ease, opening to the the ‘soul ulcer screaming out’ (70).
Camping out with lyrical honesty is a queer trip and the heart-grab begins from the first. Never a ‘sure way of sourcing the true thing in either the fullness or the voids’ (1). Page after page dog-eared. Not a single false note.
Read it, then read it out loud. Let the language of noorn snake into you. ‘Stories grow from the exchange of breath, from moving to and fro, from investment and exchange, that is, they grow from story-business’ (39). Such a generous gift.
To read hard copy will be differently moving, lines running loose, but the audiobook, the author precisely reading her own work, has me reeling. The story too, has a dangerously sharp edge, like that ‘fairytale inheritance’, reeking apricots, ripening to death.
Bold lush big sister poetry that watches feral dogs in Nimbin, feels the rip of a done-with-it-all young man’s departure. She rubs shoulders with ‘indifferent angels’, uncovers Britannica dream sellers, breathes in places close to my own. Desire is different to wanting.
Déjà vu reading this book, recognising the detail of a whorl of hair on a man’s back, the truths in voices unfurling to attention, transitory lives, various meanings. Plot-lovers, stay away. Those who seek the nudge of submerged truths, this is yours.
Call these stories anecdotes, call them ethnography. A cat wails, mourning her sister. A little Gothic. Elephants, shaking dirt off their ancestor’s bones. Close to Greek Gothic. Dolphins and monkeys, carrying their rotting infants. Gothic as all get out. All true. It’s uncanny.
To witness, to be respectful, ‘to look more closely’ in order to ‘recognise that the nonhuman has a life that means something to herself’ (25). Respect involves learning, to know ‘the sensitive beak contains more nerve endings than a human fingertip’ (141).
