RITA DOVE SELECTS "RAIN AT THREE"
FROM GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS
FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
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Girls are Coming out of the Woods is part of the Forward Prizes "highly commended" list of poems. Here's a performance filmed at the Dylan Thomas Birth Place in Swansea
DEBORAH LEVY
Desire, she says, is her subject. Not just sexual desire—the chase between two people (“although we mustn’t forget we have bodies”), but desire for all kinds of things. “There’s that Hollywood slogan which I really like for writing scripts: Who wants what and what’s stopping them from getting it? That’s something I ask in every book I write. Where’s the desire in the book? Because a book without desire is a depressed book.”
Marguerite Duras, who is a kind of guiding spirit across Levy’s work, once said that the task of literature was to represent what’s forbidden. To be scandalous. To say what isn’t normally said. Levy is more interested in the uncanny, in making the invisible visible.
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Desire, she says, is her subject. Not just sexual desire—the chase between two people (“although we mustn’t forget we have bodies”), but desire for all kinds of things. “There’s that Hollywood slogan which I really like for writing scripts: Who wants what and what’s stopping them from getting it? That’s something I ask in every book I write. Where’s the desire in the book? Because a book without desire is a depressed book.”
Marguerite Duras, who is a kind of guiding spirit across Levy’s work, once said that the task of literature was to represent what’s forbidden. To be scandalous. To say what isn’t normally said. Levy is more interested in the uncanny, in making the invisible visible.
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Fatima Bhutto by Carolne Issa
FATIMA BHUTTO
“I guess it’s all these things that bother me that I put into the book. Just the experience of space in South Asia, the way you experience space means cutting off that space for someone else… You see these Vice videos about that side of the city as though there’s some kind of inherent bravery about being elite in a dangerous place like Pakistan. There isn’t. And it’s time to chip at that idea. Many people have done it. But I’m always happy to do it.”
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WILLIAM DALRYMPLE TALKS ABOUT OUR CROSS-GENERATIONAL FRIENDSHIP IN THE AUGUST 2018 ISSUE OF VOGUE INDIA
"The slap of the thigh with which the poetry-dance piece ends encapsulates the tension that is prescient in the collection: a compelling moment of anger and defiance, intersecting the power of the spoken word with that of the physical body" -- A REVIEW IN POETRY SCHOOL
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Tishani Doshi performs Girls are Coming out of the Woods. photo: Carlo Pizzati
A NEW INTERVIEW SERIES for OPEN MAGAZINE
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GIRL IN A BOX
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI