Counter Reform

By Charlotte Newman

Do you count the number of adjectives you use, and the number of syllables in the words? Do you put things down only with your left hand or step with your right foot forward so that the left is always last? Counter Reform is a glimpse into the world of obsessive compulsive disorder, how it shapes every corner of your conscious mind, from the intellect to your social or anti-social life and sexuality. It is rarely tidy but often darkly funny, absurd, mathematical and something that needs to be resisted at every opportunity. This is an exercise in that resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rough Trade Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912722587

Charlotte Newman

CHARLOTTE NEWMAN was born in Surrey in 1986. She was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge and Birkbeck, University of London. She won the inaugural Sabotage Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2013 and was featured in The Salt Book of Younger Poets in 2011. She was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2017 and was featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018.Her literary criticism has appeared in The Observer, The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Dark Horse, among others; she was shortlisted for The Scotsman’s Allen Wright Award for theatre criticism. Charlotte works in public affairs and PR. She is the author of Selected Poems (Annexe, 2012) and Trammel (Penned in the Margins, 2016).

Book preview

Obsession

"Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour…

Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave."

—Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

This is an anti-confessional and an anti-self-help not-book. It is entirely unconstructive and will likely foster rage or rebellion depending on who you are and what you care about, if indeed you care about anything at all. You may know that many people do not.

Your responses to everything should be aligned along the lines of the physical and intellectual. This is present in concentrated form when you have obsessions and compulsions. It is pathologised as obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. It is like living on a planet colonised by H.R. Giger, and run by Nurse Ratched.

Or maybe Nurse Jackie.

Its effects are physical and both intellectual and anti-intellectual at the same time. It is similar to everyone and different for everyone. It is not about liking things clean. It is about making a mess of human mechanisms, of trying to control metaphysics. It is a means of playing God.

***

On average, 200 glottal strops a day to mask swallowing. Misfortune of teeth gritting too hard when perturbed. A nightmare for grinding teeth, whittled down now to toothpicks.

Five chapters in to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, the