Launch speech for My Bourgeois Apocalypse
As the cover suggests, this is a sparkly book, full of all kinds of gorgeous and scintillating objects and ideas and phrases, some dregs, some transparency but also some locked boxes. The contents pages give such a good sense of the book I could almost give a launch speech just by reading them out: poem titles like “This doesn’t happen here…but it did,” “A poem is a thinking thing,” “I apologise in advance to fans of Blake,” “We don’t actually have that many parties,” “I thought 2020 was going to be a great year, how wrong I was,” and “At least at Level 3 we could get takeaways delivered,” give a pretty good picture of the particular kind of sparkling the book is – a very Helen kind of sparkling. Helen reads widely and deeply, throws many parties and has many friends, loves widely and deeply, is funny, self-aware, and wryly ironic, and makes literary art out of the chaos life throws at us – and life threw a lot of chaos into the mix from February 2019 to October 2024, the time period covered in this book.
So, this is a very Helen book full of Helen’s life – it draws from actual diaries as well as from writing exercises, lists, language homework, dream journals and other raw, sometimes very raw, material. A very Helen book that is at the same time completely different from any of her other books – being constantly innovative and ambitious as a poet is also part of who Helen is. This book is like nothing you’ve ever read before by anyone – though if you’ve read Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be a little less at sea than if you haven’t. But if you haven’t, you can skip straight to My Bourgeois Apocalypse which has already now eclipsed both of those books in brilliance and emotional depth.
The first poem begins, “To fish for something is to put out bait, or a lure.” And, to quote from my blurb, when you start reading this book you may well feel played like a fish, lured in with a line that seems to be leading to a scene, or a situation, only to find yourself disoriented by a change of pronoun, a detail out of place, a shift in time. Before long it becomes apparent that the sentences do not quite read consecutively, but by now you will be hooked by the poetry’s strange rhythms, the alternating flashes of lucidity and opacity, and your sense of a situation being gradually revealed in its different facets, revealed but never quite fully explained. Romance, of course, often involves the kinds of “doubts and gaps” that we find, also, in poetry; and so do the complicated dynamics with friends, that are particularly complicated in this weird historical moment of lockdowns, living room dance parties, cancelled classes and masked meetings you might remember.
Poem 33 is titled “(I am no longer afraid of quicksand, but is that a mistake?)” and it begins, “I am waiting for something to happen.” Something, we gradually realise, is happening, as terrible as quicksand – a father dying, the daughter only gradually understanding he will not be recovering from this last hospitalisation. But like all the stories told in this work, it is told in fragments, incrementally, details passed over and returned to later. Anxiety and grief are mixed up with more mundane worries about a missing wallet, the status of pine trees, conversations with friends, and in poem 36, titled, “His Last Phone Call Was A Mixture of Comedy and Tragedy, But So Is Life,” the short space between the question, is he dying, and the “next thing that happened,” the nurses preparing the body for the mortuary, is filled with comments on her fingernail polish (blue) and a desire to start doing writing exercises again. Calling herself “Sulky McSulkypants” seems extraordinarily hard on herself at a time like this, and, at the same time, disquietingly lighthearted – not many writers would allow themselves such a shift in register. But Helen is more interested in honesty than convention, and this is a bracingly unconventional book.
The overall effect of these shifts in register and narrative fragmentation is to suggest the deep undercurrents to every exchange and every observation, and an investment of meaning in the most singular and fleeting of moments and details. For all its formal innovation, this is not a work without heart, but a work flooded with passionate feeling. I love it, and I challenge you to love it as much as I do - this is thekind of book that every reader will make their own.
As the cover suggests, this is a sparkly book, full of all kinds of gorgeous and scintillating objects and ideas and phrases, some dregs, some transparency but also some locked boxes. The contents pages give such a good sense of the book I could almost give a launch speech just by reading them out: poem titles like “This doesn’t happen here…but it did,” “A poem is a thinking thing,” “I apologise in advance to fans of Blake,” “We don’t actually have that many parties,” “I thought 2020 was going to be a great year, how wrong I was,” and “At least at Level 3 we could get takeaways delivered,” give a pretty good picture of the particular kind of sparkling the book is – a very Helen kind of sparkling. Helen reads widely and deeply, throws many parties and has many friends, loves widely and deeply, is funny, self-aware, and wryly ironic, and makes literary art out of the chaos life throws at us – and life threw a lot of chaos into the mix from February 2019 to October 2024, the time period covered in this book.
So, this is a very Helen book full of Helen’s life – it draws from actual diaries as well as from writing exercises, lists, language homework, dream journals and other raw, sometimes very raw, material. A very Helen book that is at the same time completely different from any of her other books – being constantly innovative and ambitious as a poet is also part of who Helen is. This book is like nothing you’ve ever read before by anyone – though if you’ve read Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be a little less at sea than if you haven’t. But if you haven’t, you can skip straight to My Bourgeois Apocalypse which has already now eclipsed both of those books in brilliance and emotional depth.
The first poem begins, “To fish for something is to put out bait, or a lure.” And, to quote from my blurb, when you start reading this book you may well feel played like a fish, lured in with a line that seems to be leading to a scene, or a situation, only to find yourself disoriented by a change of pronoun, a detail out of place, a shift in time. Before long it becomes apparent that the sentences do not quite read consecutively, but by now you will be hooked by the poetry’s strange rhythms, the alternating flashes of lucidity and opacity, and your sense of a situation being gradually revealed in its different facets, revealed but never quite fully explained. Romance, of course, often involves the kinds of “doubts and gaps” that we find, also, in poetry; and so do the complicated dynamics with friends, that are particularly complicated in this weird historical moment of lockdowns, living room dance parties, cancelled classes and masked meetings you might remember.
Poem 33 is titled “(I am no longer afraid of quicksand, but is that a mistake?)” and it begins, “I am waiting for something to happen.” Something, we gradually realise, is happening, as terrible as quicksand – a father dying, the daughter only gradually understanding he will not be recovering from this last hospitalisation. But like all the stories told in this work, it is told in fragments, incrementally, details passed over and returned to later. Anxiety and grief are mixed up with more mundane worries about a missing wallet, the status of pine trees, conversations with friends, and in poem 36, titled, “His Last Phone Call Was A Mixture of Comedy and Tragedy, But So Is Life,” the short space between the question, is he dying, and the “next thing that happened,” the nurses preparing the body for the mortuary, is filled with comments on her fingernail polish (blue) and a desire to start doing writing exercises again. Calling herself “Sulky McSulkypants” seems extraordinarily hard on herself at a time like this, and, at the same time, disquietingly lighthearted – not many writers would allow themselves such a shift in register. But Helen is more interested in honesty than convention, and this is a bracingly unconventional book.
The overall effect of these shifts in register and narrative fragmentation is to suggest the deep undercurrents to every exchange and every observation, and an investment of meaning in the most singular and fleeting of moments and details. For all its formal innovation, this is not a work without heart, but a work flooded with passionate feeling. I love it, and I challenge you to love it as much as I do - this is thekind of book that every reader will make their own.
