Languish

By Marion May Campbell

She stages language as trickster, traitor and seducer, flamboyantly connecting and wiring the circuitry of desire, just as it silences and slices. One moment, it stutters, teetering on the brink, and the next it transfigures loss in radiant dreamscapes, restoring ardour amongst the ruins of allegory. languish is Campbell's eleventh book across the forms of fiction, poetry and critical theory. Her writing is always charged by a poetics of feminist contestation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781743822579

Marion May Campbell

Marion May Campbell is a prize-winning author who has written novels, theatre works, poetry, short fiction, essays, reviews and academic literary papers. She has been the recipient of awards, literature grants and residencies, including one at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She studied French and German literature and has subsequently taught French, comparative literature and creative writing at various Australian universities. She currently supervises graduate writing projects at the University of Melbourne. konkretion is her fifth work of fiction.

Book preview

I. our heels on the throat of their song

speechless

in this drought-struck place rain is

ellipsis between blurred passages

is loss & longed for location

for us who stutter belatedly

out of numbing to trace

new tracks through this flayed flesh

yes please & still the myopic girl peers

through the long heat haze

the big print men shimmer in as

the luxury of our exquisite unsaid

develops over centuries from the filigree

we grope in the anticipatory susurration

fricatives sizzle somewhere for us

plosives plonk & roll like whiskered seals

amused in reef pools & listen as

the nasals find their flutes

we trust in our long withheld power

verbs that’ll paint us in

but more now          the lightning

strike that’ll turn any noun electric

in steeped cumulus & wire us straight

to nerve          where new synaptic flares

& vaults occur          but only once we’ve

sleepwalked through years & years towards

writing in our maybe-modes to break

this isolation of wounded consciousness

whose claim to suffer cannot reach

the billion lives that we detain

in the tropic margins of our precious

speechlessness

against this flint

she flung the red placenta of self

against the sky then came the crows

their shadows     a darker red     rode

the crimson & viridian marked the zone

where was aborted          what she might’ve been

she should’ve known

never to trust a man who loved

the double-vulvaed headless dolls

of Hans Bellmer

she flew to the smiling woman

in dreams     blind and sure

like a bat’s radar

the smiling woman didn’t have a clue

who on earth

this petitioner was

Violette Leduc said she was born

on the tip of the town hall clerk’s

pen – inked into law

as outlaw she wrote & drove

the black to market     the outward drive

against the inner pull

the unknown tugging within

the known     exquisite

ache of it

she wants the extreme

naked encounter no code

can register

rapscallion     if only like Teresias

seven years woman

I could ovulate & seed

without that know-it-all irony

of fate she said how to strike

another self against this flint

I want this book Artaud wrote

that I suspend in life to be gnawed at

by external