After You Were, I Am

Ralphs, Camille

Faber&Faber

Malkin is a vivid evocation of the trials of the Pendle Witches in 1612. The sequence of poems is delivered in the form of epitaphic monologues, with the accused men and women eerily addressing the reader with their confessions and pleas. Strikingly, Camille Ralphs has employed unorthodox spelling throughout the monologues, bringing out new meanings in familiar words and encouraging the reader to immerse themselves in the world of the poems. Fully illustrated with woodcut-style drawings from Emma Wright.

Malkin: An Ellegy in 14 Spels

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Emma Press

An extraordinary debut from Camille Ralphs, heralding the arrival of a major new talent. In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book's three sections - rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee - obsess over individual human characters, and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. This is poetry as incantation, plea and invocation. Drawing on a vast range of influences, from sacred texts and early modern drama to Metaphysical wit, twentieth-century Confessionalism and contemporary irony and mistrust, this ambitious debut embodies the variety and singularity of living voices past and present, which through rapturous music, anarchic wordplay and formal distortion are dragged to breaking point. The very history of the English language glows through the cracks. The effect is a terrestrial transcendence, as spaces within and between human thoughts expand to reveal a shared heritage of faults and answerless questions at every turn. Ralphs's style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, maker of poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.

McSweeney's

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics: Volume 4, Issue 3 (Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics, 4)

Ackerman, Elliot

Vendler, Helen

OZICK, Cynthia

IGNATIEFF, Michael

Ahmari, Sohrab

Azizi, Arash

Kimmage, Michael

RIEFF, DAVID

BRENDEL, Alfred

Noah, Timothy

Kinstler, Linda

Hrytsak, Yaroslav

Gutkin, Len

Gribbin, Alice

Arts & Photography

Liberties Journal

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