Bad Betty Press bring us some great work, and this anthology is a shining example.
Among them highlights were
Notes from Mykonos Beach at 4am by Toby Campion
Glitter Fists by Anna Kahn
The Visit by Kate B Hall
an untitled poem by Cat Chong
Ambition by Carl Burkitt
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This is a delight of a collection in its celebration of Polari – part of the wider project to claim our queer histories…
I found the poem “I’m sure they are talking about us” which uses a selection of Polari words that have become mainstream powerful – all of which are very much in my family’s lexicon – English is perhaps the greatest magpie of a language and steals words all over the place.
The other thing that comes through is joy – Polari is a language that existed because queer people could not speak plainly – but they took that oppression and created something that delighted in itself, playful, punful, fierce in its defiance.
Polari is one of the ways that the queer boys find each other and end up giggling in the corner – but that invites some people and also excludes others – I acknowledge that without necessarily apologising for it. You can’t force community – but you can create communities that are open ended – and you put your elbows out to create space, even if they don’t join you they have space and light to find their own people …
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I put tabs on the following poems
At Purteen Harbour by Jane Clarke
‘Avoid Direct Contact With the Skull’ by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Third Gender Sonnet by Kandace Siobhan Walker
My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce by Kathryn Bevis
The School of Australia by Chen Chen
Forget by Majella Kelly
SUPER KING by Victoria Kennefick
Like This (Polari Version) by Adam Lowe
Virtual Thanksgiving by Geoffrey Philip
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Adam is a Fourteen Poems poet – the poems are strong…
I put a tag in Bathhouse
Steam rises, a question in the room:
wet, dripping and mingling with sweat.
It’s hard to age a person from their genitals
alone, much less the way they yearn.
Somewhere in a darkroom, a man pulls
secrets out of another man. We men have long
held our motives for coming, this non-place
its organic edges, for meeting eyes as if through
an amoeba’s membrance. The lamps are dimmed,
we all believe, to preserve fantasy; we fear light
will reveal how gently we touch ourselves.
But other poems that I also remembered were;
The Boys Are Killing Their Sims On the Family PC
Cotton-Collared Mafiosi – because when me and a friend told our teacher we were being bullied by a kid in a lower year we were entirely gas-lit – two kids who didn’t yet know their were queer the victims of toxic masculinity from above and below!
Concrete Quarterly
After watching the amazing Invisible Boys I was keen to explore more of Holden Sheppard’s word.
The Black Flower is a short story that is gut wrenching – honest about the damage passed through generations – confronting about the destructive nature of addiction – written so well.
Also included is A Man – an even shorter story – a day, ordinary, but told with a punch that makes us pay attention.
Both examples of the greater skill is to write short stories, complete in themselves, than long stories.
Jay plays with “form” – for example the poem “Twitter Is My Deadname” is the shape of the once familiar bird logo.
Some of the images were powerful – as when the poem “The Popped Football” touched a nerve.
The third part of the collection is a collaboration piece – and Jay treatment of the experiences of others is tender and skilful.
I will start with a spoiler alert – in talking about this book I will be talking about the plot…
The literary conceit of this work is that it is David Wan’s memoir, his telling of his story, which in the final pages after David’s death becomes the task of his partner. What does this add? Not much, for the largest part it reads as a standard novel.
There are some key facts in the story, David goes to a Public School on a bursary, and the power dynamic with the family that provided that bursary, despite their kindness to David, which is toxic. David is of mixed heritage and is othered because he is seen as “non-white”, but having been brought up in England by his English Mother, he doesn’t really have a connection to the thing that causes him to be othered. David is gay. David’s mother enters a long-term relationship with another women. The son of the family that provide the bursary, Giles, is the shadow to the story, a Brexit championing politician – he lurks on the sidelines of the story but has no real part to play. David becomes a successful actor. David dies as the result of a racial and homophobic assault – even in his final moments he is defined by his “otherness”.
I think I enjoyed it as a collection of short stories, as a whole it didn’t engage – Hollinghurst work has also had a strong social / political commentary – but the two other novels of his I have read were published some years before I read them, time creates a certain detachment from the situations and the commentary – while we are still living the post-Brexit post-COVID lives that Hollinghurst is commenting on here, and maybe there is a rawness about it all that is difficult.
