In God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, Arinze Ifeakandu’s beautiful debut collection out tomorrow from A Public Space Books, people often struggle to express their true emotions and feelings. Living in a world that may not accept who they are and whom they love, it is at times difficult for the book’s queer characters to speak what’s on their mind. Ifeakandu [...] often uses a description of the world to express their emotional state—at times he uses metaphor; at others, he simply describes the landscape. The way that he chooses to depict a character’s world, seen through their eyes, also reflects their emotional landscape. It is a subtle and beautiful way to portray these characters, to allow us to truly understand how they feel.
It is this thread of refusal to be pitied, to have what happened to his family reduced to "a tawdry bit of sentimental fluff for people to tut along to and say how sad," that makes Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? so rousing. That it is also deadly funny is an extra treat.
Badger gives a clear account of the shifts in documentary photography as an art form in Britain from 1945 to the present day, but it is the social, cultural and political climate of each decade that has been the biggest impetus for change, and it is these important contexts that Badger conveys so concisely and well, showing how they helped to shape new generations of documentary photographers, intent on recording life and death in a creative way.
Smith hunts for the most effective metaphor for the Internet, a concept that encompasses more than the vacuity of “content” and the addictiveness of the “attention economy.” Is it like a postcoital-snail telegraph? Or like a Renaissance-era wheel device that allowed readers to browse multiple books at once? Or perhaps like a loom that weaves together souls? He doesn’t quite land on an answer, though he ends by recognizing that the interface of the Internet, and the keyboard that gives him access to it, is less an external device than an extension of his questing mind. To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities. In a sense, the Instagram egg has yet to fully hatch.
They were on clearance,
shelved alongside the first, unwelcome
Christmas baubles —
bulbs of a different nature.