Michelle Bailat-Jones

My reading is all over the place right now. I just finished Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl (excellent, interesting and even a provocative narrative positioning) and Juan Pablo Villalobos, (tr. Rosalind Harvey) Down the Rabbit Hole (grotesquely funny, deeply sad – I may never get over what happens to those pygmy hippos).

I have started reading Anakana Schofield’s Martin John (vying for most interesting book of the year so far, it is fantastic and I cannot wait to finish).

But this evening I am continuing Jan Zwicky’s collection Chamber Music and I keep reading a single poem, “Epistemology” over and over. I would love to put the whole poem here but will content myself with sharing a few lines only, although uncoupling them from their context seems like a horrible amputation.

“And, without warning, I could tell that I was

seven storeys in the air. The fragrance of the earth

when I lay down on it. Because

I’d pulled the fuses from my heart

and every corridor was suddenly ablaze.”