At this point feelings are the unsung hero of the pandemic’s resolution — they may be marauding, suppressive, and wholly refractory, but they also offer a singular means of coping. Among support networks of family, friends, and pets, feelings are what keep me going and what keep me connected.
I didn’t grow up in a literary family. We delivered newspapers; we didn’t read them. We told stories constantly, but we never wrote them down. My parents held blue-collar jobs. They worked double, sometimes triple shifts to pay for a house in a peaceful neighborhood with no speed bumps, where my sisters and I rode pink Huffy bikes around the sunny cul-de-sac during the summer.
Even at this young age, I knew my mother was different from other mothers. She did not volunteer to make heart-shaped valentines out of construction paper in my classroom or cut oranges into quarters and distribute them at soccer games. She was always at work. I knew my mother never had the chance to go to high school in her country, never mind college, but I also knew that she made her daughters excited to return to school each September.
It’s hard to think of any recent time when a historical novel about the persecution of women wouldn’t resonate painfully with current headlines, but AK Blakemore’s exceptionally accomplished debut feels especially pertinent now, as women’s protests against their treatment by men are met with further aggression or accusations of hysteria. The Manningtree Witches is a fictionalised account of the Essex witch trials of 1645, and includes excerpts from the trial records, fleshed out in the imagined narrative of one of the accused women, 19-year-old Rebecca West.
“A poem is the most efficient form of time travel,” observes Mr. Young, 50, who is also poetry editor of the New Yorker. His writing, he says, is often guided by an impulse to preserve the past by recording it, archiving the stories and feelings that might otherwise be lost to time. In this way, he says, “the power of poetry is much like the power of a museum”: Both can evoke a time and place by bearing witness to history.
I gather you were in the lobby
Minutes before.
Terrifying to almost see you again.
I smelled the shockwave, the burning air.