‘Rootlessly cosmopolitan—as fluent in the language of the office as in the language of the bedroom, in the theorems of science as in the paradoxes of theology—poetry is a perennial migrant in the republic of letters.’
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‘A rock can outlive history, so long as history does not break the rock.’
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‘Language passes through me, in cloudy shapes I only vaguely recognise as the distance between myself and the rest of the world.’
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‘Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.’
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‘The prose poem begins in present tense—we are inside the trauma.’
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‘Perhaps the moment-to-moment labour of crafting verse is not wildly dissimilar to the invisible quotidian acts of looking after those we love.’
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‘I fill in the silence with the voices who are familiar to me, the words of those in whom I see myself, signing towards an estranged wilderness that we call home.’
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‘What might it mean to acknowledge that this is the substance of the labour performed by many of us, those of us who aspire to do anything but?’
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‘Throughout her oeuvre, Kapil’s writing mutates beyond her initial idea; the trace of the act of writing and its metamorphosis is not erased in the final congealment of the book.’
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‘The difference between swimming and drowning, then, is to ignore your reflection in the water before you jump in.’
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‘The best literature complicates morality. Characters are flawed. The resolution is messy. What is lost cannot be redeemed.’
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‘We as minoritised folks more broadly want outsiders to understand: there are a hundred ways to be.’
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‘Cho offers a lesson in how to write alongside the void…’
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‘I realise that my mind, this same mind, will only ever produce the same insights over and over, with varying degrees of clarity, as if I were new versions of a smartphone each time.’
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‘Any faithful reading of Cahier requires attention to more than one thing that requires reiterating; the book is uncontainable.’
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‘Acknowledging that the ‘truth’ in nonfiction writing is tricky and inherently interpretable subtly undermines the rigidity of mainstream publishing where such books must fall into specific categories.’
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‘There are stories out there we don’t know we’ll love and I think it’s a tragedy. It keeps our worlds small.’
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‘The poem may be expansive, in the sense of an expanding empire, a grab for territory, but there is precious little joyous about it.’
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‘This book, with all its horrors, distance and intensity is also a device I use to work out who—or indeed, what—it is that I love.’
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‘I am coming out as someone who does not read to get ahead of the narrative. I am coming out as someone who does not read as himbo representation. I am coming out as someone who does not read as an act of radical vulnerability.’
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