Euphoria

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A poet of astonishing range and inventiveness, Williams was at once a daring formal innovator, one of the band of modernists who transformed American poetry, and an intimate, sometimes savagely frank chronicler of the life and landscape of his native New Jersey.” Trilogyby H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) This isn't helped by the fact that this triangle involves three characters King failed to make authentically human. Probably because this story was inspired by the life of Margaret Mead, King devoted most of her attention to Nell. Nell is therefore fleshed out pretty well; however, King gave surprisingly short shrift to Nell’s husband Fen. He’s a cardboard character who’s never not an uncaring husband and often an uninterested anthropologist who increasingly annoys Nell. When he gets jealous, viciousness rises to the surface in a flash. Euphoria was inspired by anthropologist Margaret Mead and her experiences along the Sepik River with her husband Reo Fortune and the British anthropologist who would become her second husband, Gregory Bateson. But the story is entirely of King’s invention, including the tribes and their cultures. The novel is a feat of research, imagination, passion, and restraint. Greenwood recalled how Quindrie had “so many great pitches coming through” when they were looking for contributors. He thought many of the original submissions were “sweet” and “nice”. Indeed, there’s such fiery confidence here, such cleanness – something of the cleanness of Plath’s own poems – that it doesn’t necessarily matter that it’s about Plath. Cullhed has the poet resolve that “I would never again ask for permission to write”. I wonder if Cullhed found her own permission to write in Plath, as well as a poetic register that she could take on and expand. This is a book about the precipitous, high-stakes relationship between creative genius and domestic life, centred on the lure and dangers of freedom.

Jade Sarson told PinkNews that they weren’t initially going to submit a comic for When I Was Me as submissions opened at a time when they were “super low” and feeling “major dysphoria and imposter syndrome”.Laird hopes others who are “confused by the concept of being trans” can see these joyful moments expressed in the anthology and realise they can still support and love trans people even if they “never fully understand” the experiences of those within the community. ‘It doesn’t matter what other people think of me because the people I truly care about ‘get’ me’ also like the people in the trees, it's my second book by this author, when i five starred the first and felt totally blah about the second. Enter Andrew Bankson, an Englishman who has been in New Guinea for years, studying the Kiona tribe. Bankson, escaping the shadow of an overbearing mother and the ghosts of two dead brothers, is on the brink of suicide. He invites the Stones to return to New Guinea, but they are aware of the competitive nature of anthropologists and fear that there’s no more room in the territory for them to set up camp. Bankson, loneliness seeping from his pores, introduces the Stones to the Tam tribe and the three become a triangle of intellect and intrigue. But the beautiful writing is only part of the story. The plot follows, not overly closely to be sure, the New Guinea experiences of Margaret Mead and her team. But as we draw closer and closer to the end, the setting changes to Australia and becomes pot-boilery, overheated, and unconvincing to me. Cullhed succeeds in creating a book for our times; this isn’t yet another dissection of a time long past

There’s also a lovely repeated image, drawn I think from the poet Amy Lowell, about two kinds of love: the intoxicating flush that comes with wine and the comforting sustenance provided by bread.

Like an album of photographic negatives, this book is transformed by light, inhabited by family, illness, mortality, and faith. There is a brooding intelligence here, radiant with fireworks and emergency flares.

While he doesn’t “want to be perceived”, Sarson does want to be understood – and having good sex is a “big part of that”. He said the piece was a “whole new level of scary to make”, because he had to be “truly honest”.The winning volume in the 1982 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Cathy Song’s Picture Bride, a book about people and their innumerable journeys. Distinguished poet Richard Hugo says, ‘Cathy Song’s poems are flowers: colorful, sensual, and quiet, and they are offered almost shyly as bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most. She often reminds a loud, indifferent, hard world of what truly matters to the human spirit.'” Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (1963–) It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion – you’ve only been there eight weeks – and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria. Also included are excerpts from Nell’s journals, so we get glimpses into her work and her complex feelings for the two men, as well as her memories of another colleague and former lover, Helen. Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. It was not ontological. It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public.

A book about anthropologists in the 1930s ought to transport and educate, but Euphoria does neither very well. Too often I was told what’s happening in the tribes, not placed in the center of any action. Experience first-hand Margaret Maed, a leading anthropologist, and her discoveries of what makes us humans in different cultures narrated by the perceptive author Lily King!As Nell, Fen and Bankson compare the culture of their subjects to their own, there is much that defines what it is to be human and much that makes them wonder at how superior civilization really is.