We don’t know what we’re doing by Thomas Morris

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This is a powerful collection of short stories.

Set in Caerphilly, location is the thread that runs through them, small town tales, a place with a strong sense of itself but probably aware that the past was better than the future.

These are punchy stories – the characters are really well written, in the space of a couple of dozen pages you have fully invested in them as people. There is a theme of mental illness, depression and anxiety, which is maybe “on trend” for 2020, but as a collection published in 2015 represents a prophetic voice.

In some cases these issues felt a little close to home – I got the book at the end of 2017 and have read the stories every few months – they are powerful and therefore I don’t think this is a book to sit down and read cover to cover, you need time to let them settle and process before reading the next one.

The final story is a bit of a sci-fi, but like most of the best sci-fi it speaks to a completely contemporary issue – in this case the fact that we spend so much time on social media we fail to engage with the real world around us.

I will probably re-read this, which is the highest praise I can give, there are very few books I actually ever go back to…

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

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It is not easy to respond to this book, clearly I have to begin by accepting my own White privilege and watch myself to avoid the racial equivalent of “manplaining”.

The major point is that being “colour-blind” functions to uphold the status quo, as Reni puts it

“Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative steretypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon – earned or not – because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.”

Reni also notes that “I have to be honest with myself. When I write as an outsider, I am also an insider in so many ways. I am university-educated, able-bodied, and I speak and write in ways very similar to those I criticise. I walk and talk like them, and part of that is why I am taken seriously. As I write about shattering perspectives and disrupting faux objectivity, I have to remember that there are factors in my life that bolster my voice above others.”

Reni wrestles with intersectionality – different “minority” groups can find themselves in situations of competition, and for example as a women of colour Reni find herself challenged by some Feminists who want her to sign up to a universal female experience and refute any difference between women of colour and white women – the experience of people of colour within the LGBT+ community is an equally sorry story. (I put minority in speak-marks because of course women are not a numerically minority group, nor are people of colour once you look to a global scale).

One of the personal ‘take aways’ (if you will excuse that horrid phrase) from this book was the political/societal importance of coming out – Reni reflects on the ways that people make assumptions because as a women of colour they look at her and “see” someone “different” whereas as a white man people might not “see” my sexuality. It is possible, and often tempting, to operate in the closet – but allowing people to stay within their default hetronormative assumptions is in fact to collude with oppression.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2019

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Just two of the poems from this excellent collection...

The Quilt by Abigail Parry

The quilt’s a ragtag syzygy
of everything I’ve been or done,
a knotted spell in every seam,
the stuff that pricks and pulls. The quilt

began in ’96. I scrapped
the blotch batiks and brocatelles
each backward-bending paisley hook
that tied me to my town. The quilt

came with me when I packed and left
– a bad patch, that – you’ll see I’ve sewn
a worried blot of grey and black
to mark a bruisy year. The quilt

advances, in a shock campaign
through block-fluoresecent souvenirs
of seedy clubs and bad psi-trance
and peters out in blue. The quilt

came with me when I ditched the scene
and dressed myself as someone new
– or someone else, at any rate
and someone better, too – I felt

a charlatan in borrowed suits,
and flower prints, and pastel hues,
but things had turned respectable,
and so I stitched that in. The quilt

has tessellated all of it.
Arranged, like faithful paladins,
are half a dozen bits and scraps
from those who took a turn, then split –

the dapper one, the rugby fan,
the one who liked his gabardine,
the one who didn’t want to be another patch in your fucking quilt
but got there all the same. The quilt

is lined with all the bitter stuff
I couldn’t swallow at the time –
the lemon-yellow calico
I never wore again. The guilt

snuck into every thread of it
and chafed all through the honeymoon.
I scissored out the heart of it
and stitched it, fixed it, final, here –

with every other bright mistake
I wear, like anyone.

Something wonderful has happened it is called you by Emily Critchley

and mostly these days I just like to look

at you and sometimes make words

out of your name or rock you

in my arms till the thought of I

with or without poetry

no longer matters.

It’s not like I have forgotten

how to worry

about disappearing forests, landfill or the ozone layer

I pray that when you grow up there may still be

polar bears, for instance, forests and an ozone layer

keep the sun off yr precious face

and not just in the zoo

I worry about other things too, but mostly

it is hard to be unhappy these days especially

now the spring’s advancing and you’re learning

about hands – how to hold things in them

and take everything it’s yours