In this essay on Emily Dickinson and ‘anorexic aesthetics’, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight blends close reading and autobiography, critical analysis and personal narrative. Moving between Dickinson scholarship, Sad Girl Theory, editorial history, psychiatric literature, recovery narratives and Tumblr-era anorexia discourse, this essay traces various forms of inexpressibility, from the ‘quiet rooms’ of Dickinson’s dashes to the ‘stops and starts’ of writing and the self-erasure implicit in many accounts of anorexic recovery. What emerges is a deeply moving and sometimes unsettling reckoning with what cannot or should not be said. ‘I cannot tell you, I should not tell you,’ says Shevchenko Knight. ‘These are the disasters of a writer.’
Note: This essay discusses eating disorders and mental illness. If you are affected by issues raised here and would like support, you can contact Beat UK’s helpline service.
I WISH YOU A KINDER SEA
For a decade I keep a blog on tumblr called I wish you a kinder sea, a line borrowed from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend. The blog functions as a kind of harbour for late-night thoughts and a growing interest in poetry.
Scrolling through it now, I find a ceaseless stream of images which appear unrelated –
rocky formations in a crashing sea;
I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life;
unintelligible smudges, Cy Twombly’s quasi blue period;
MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE glowing through the night;
Anne Carson and Joan Didion, severe in black & white;
A not admitting of the wound / Until it grew so wide / That all my Life had entered it
Wedged between this iconography, my own diminishing quips, sorry I’ve not been posting so much, I’ve been suffering, laced with irony, occasional mirror selfie, my face turned slight right, demonstrating jawline, poke of collarbone.
What strikes me is the sophistication of my illness. Here I am honing an aesthetic justification for how I treat myself, my body. What it is I get to say, and what I don’t. Or perhaps curating a vision for my future self, a stoic among stones. How out of place that blog title seems, I wish you a kinder sea, amongst this cold business.
Who is that wish meant for? What nameless figure do I wave at from the opposite shore, hoping she might be happier. Is it Dickinson in the distance? Or is it the woman I am whittling myself into.
SAD GIRL THEORY
The advent of my blog coincides with Sad Girl Theory, the melancholy brainchild of artist Audrey Wollen. Sad Girl Theory takes the blogosphere by storm. In interviews with outlets like NYLON and Dazed, Wollen describes her Sad Girl Theory as not just her artistic practice but her general methodology for existing or surviving.
What does that mean, or even look like, in practice? What is a methodology for the Sad Girl?
If I were to search for Sad Girl Theory now, I wouldn’t find much to link Wollen to the movement. The associated social media account has been locked, most of the artwork Wollen produced in its name wiped, save for a few digital artworks replicated on tumblr pages ad infinitum, intellectual property unsalvageable from an avalanche of screenshots.
My favourite is a black & white piece, Girls Own The Void. It warns male artists that nothing does not belong to them and crosses out works from the likes of John Cage and Yves Klein.
Other than the digital pieces, the archive of Sad Girl Theory consists of interviews given by Wollen which rehash her proposal, each time citing a different Sad Girl to justify its cause. Sylvia Plath, Ana Mendieta, Persephone, and Little Edie join in a prolonged rally cry:
Sad Girl Theory is the proposal that the sadness of girls should be witnessed and re-historicized as an act of resistance, of political protest […] Girls’ sadness isn’t quiet, weak, shameful, or dumb: It is active, autonomous, and articulate. It’s a way of fighting back.
In essence, sadness as activism. It recalls the scene in The Virgin Suicides (1999) where the young Lisbon sisters form a ring around the elm on their street to prevent it from being cut down.
The Lisbons are precious about the elm because it holds a handprint pressed by their youngest sister, Cecilia, who takes her own life earlier in the film. Cecilia’s handprint is one of the only signs of her freedom outside of her strict Catholic upbringing.
The sisters link arm in limp arm and look on despondently. Of course, in the face of chainsaws, their grief makes no difference. They are harmless as a daisy chain. The tree is chopped down.
Do you see where this is going.
WHATEVER YOU DO
The year I am applying for university, I ask my English teacher if she could give me a reference for a Creative Writing programme.
Her name is Carmel, a spectacularly wispy woman in her sixties, hair dyed a bright orange flame, eyeliner two black smacks across the eyes, forever wearing mismatched wellies. She looks always like she has just escaped a hurricane, barely made it out, and yet here she is, ready to talk Hamlet.
I recall her often when I watch willows lilting over the Thames, completely careless, suspended to whatever force. Or when I think of Lady Lazarus, rising out of the ashes.
Carmel agrees to write my reference on the condition that whatever I do, I do not read Sylvia Plath, she’ll ruin you. And I smile and say sure, because really, it is far too late, doesn’t she already know. I am already reading Plath, Dickinson, Sexton, I am still to discover Rhys, Lispector, Ditlevsen. All these women, I read them indiscriminately, devouring their sadness, a sadness I presume passed around between all women, a cursed object we are careful not to drop, all part of our collective fate.
My act of reading these sad women, a signal towards something I cannot give words to. But Carmel must know its name, because when she asks me not to read Plath what she really means is that she can see what it is I am doing to myself, she can see how I hide behind poems.
For Carmel, Plath is perhaps interchangeable with the calamity she senses building in me. There is only a year left until she can no longer call my mother about my worrying behaviour. As long as I do not carry around a battered copy of Ariel, I’m not too far gone.
EM DASH
Here I’d like to pause and talk about Emily Dickinson – an em dash in the essay – given that its title would suggest she is the subject.
Of course, I might say this essay is about Emily Dickinson but mean something completely different. Like, this essay is about the coincidence of social withdrawal and anorexia. Or small gestures. Or the assumptions made about women in history. Or poems as identity. Or just me, hiding behind Dickinson.
Considering the hidden, I’d like to use this space to think about Dickinson’s dashes –
There is a host of literature on the peculiarities of Dickinson’s typography which I don’t intend to re-package as my own thought. So, to summarise briefly, it was unusual and unexplained in its time, and it remains so now. This is how peculiarities tend to work.
But I like to think of Dickinson’s em dashes as the space where her un-worded thoughts breathe – the poem prolonged beyond the eye – still felt, dashing across the page –
What Anne Carson might call leaving a space empty so that God can rush in, or what Maggie Nelson might consider good bonsai practice – Dickinson’s dashes are a kind of magic, a slippage where meaning shifts and forms unseen.
These dashes may offer the reader repose, a slant in the poem individually encountered and understood, a quiet room. Or they might become the [insert] that the reader understands to be where Dickinson’s meaning would continue, had she allowed it to, been allowed to.
THE FRUGAL HOUSEWIFE
Take, for instance, ‘They shut me up in Prose –’:
They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
Still! Could themself have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down opon Captivity –
And laugh – No more have I –
Here, Dickinson’s dashes appear beside words which indicate either confinement (Prose, Closet, “still”, Pound, Captivity) or their ulterior, words insinuating a rebellious force at play (peeped, Brain, go round, Treason, laugh, and importantly, I). Their movement across the page, their dashing, a refusal to be ‘still’.
It is easy to say these dashes are a matter of emphasis, that that is their use. But surely that is what the words are for. Rather, Dickinson’s dashes are an unpronounceable matter, arriving as if by telepathic electricity and connecting without connectives, as Susan Howe puts it. Imparting unknowable meaning in its absence, like the language of the gods in Homer’s Odyssey, words which have no significance unless Homer translates these to us. When he doesn’t, as in the instance of Moly, a plant unknown to contemporary audiences, Anne Carson calls this a word that stops itself, an instance of metaphysical silence.
We can imagine Moly but we cannot know it. Perhaps it is green, perhaps it sways in the wind. To another reader perhaps it grows along riverbanks and is coarse to the touch. Dickinson’s dashes are a kind of Moly, slippery beings with no ontological allegiance other than to what remains unsaid. Her meaning hidden within that quick slant line –
We can imagine Dickinson’s dashes but we cannot know them.
We can, for example, imagine that Dickinson’s dashes arrive from economic necessity. With the 2013 publication of The Gorgeous Nothings, the first full-colour fascicle edition of Dickinson’s manuscripts, a sense of Dickinson’s relationship to her writing materials is made tangible to a mainstream readership.
Flipping through the book, a glossy coffee table edition, I come across scans of envelopes torn into new shapes. Some remind me of my childhood attempts at drawing stars, half-formed things, pointing in the wrong directions. It is on the backs of these stars that Dickinson drafted poems.
Editor Jen Bervin describes how this practice stemmed from Dickinson’s New England thrift. The Dickinson family owned a copy of The Frugal Housewife, a gift from her father to her mother, which advises that the true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing is lost. These fragments include the backs of old letters.
Within the economy of the envelope, perhaps Dickinson’s extended meaning is eschewed, foreshortened, bundled into the dash. A matter of what space is afforded to her, the dash becomes an economical device –
Or we can imagine that her dashes come not from issues of economy but patriarchy. The Frugal Housewife, a gift from her father to her mother, gives a clear understanding of the space a woman can occupy in the Dickinson household: her concerns should be limited to domesticity, maintenance, care. A house cannot be kept on poems.
Literary scholar Barbara Mossberg interprets Dickinson’s stylistics and structure as reflecting a trauma of articulation, implying a pained reaction. But I read her dashes as more an extension of her performed silence and withdrawal –
Dickinson preferred to remain within the bounds of the family home and refrained from most forms of socialising; of the 3,507 pieces she wrote in her lifetime, only ten poems and a letter were published, all without attribution and likely without permission. Her domain was well-curated silence, and her dashes are a loadbearing structure, a conscious response rather than reactionary slip. Her dashes are the literally illegible characters within poetry she knows will be dismissed as unreadable regardless, incomprehensible as the language of the gods. A whole load of Moly.
Interestingly, the Emily Dickinson Museum website tells us that despite being caricatured in popular culture as a white-clad recluse who poured out morbid verse in the sanctuary of her bedroom, Emily Dickinson was a serious artist. In the context of Dickinson’s life, I don’t believe these to be mutually exclusive. I understand Dickinson to be a serious artist for that very commitment to solitude and that withdrawal from society – a society which could or would not read what she had to say.
And of course there is the possibility that this is all pure conjecture on my part, what I read and make of her movements across the page, movements which are often refusals Dickinson presents, meaning Nothing, saying Nothing, not to be read.
Yet when I encounter a –
I can nearly hear another world.
Yet when I encounter a – I can nearly hear that other world.
DETECTIVE WORK
Another curiosity of Dickinson’s practice to be gleaned from The Gorgeous Nothings is the extent of her drafting and redrafting, continually crossing out words, replacing them with others, or else placing two possible lines alongside each other. She gives us no indication of which version we should read as the ‘final’, if indeed that is how she expected her poems to be received, as singular objects with singular meanings. Her dashes would suggest otherwise.
As an example, the version of ‘They shut me up in Prose –’ quoted above is from a 1998 Complete Poems edited by Dickinson scholar Ralph Franklin, who went to painstaking lengths to be as faithful as he could to Dickinson’s intentions, at least within the confines of contemporary publishing. In this version of the poem, Captivity is looked down opon. However, in the 1955 Complete Poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Captivity is Abolished. This is not the only poem of Dickinson’s which shifts in action over time.
Publishing Dickinson’s work in a traditional sense presents a predicament of meaning and singularity which her oeuvre resists. But the restrictions of mainstream publishing cannot accommodate that resistance. Thus, her works become limited when translated into a paperback format, possibility and ambiguity curtailed in favour of consumerism. As Mossberg points out, Dickinson’s first posthumous editors in 1890 thought it prudent to doctor the poetry to make it conform more to readers’ expectations. Doctoring the poetry like a sick dog. Is this how the writing of a woman will always be encountered, some kind of howl into the night? Even if she is considered the greatest American poet to have ever lived?
Reading Dickinson with a knowledge of this fraught history becomes a kind of detective work. I sit with three editions on hand to consult, compare, as I write this, and realise that my haptic reading is far more faithful to her intentions than any singular publication could offer. So much of Dickinson is about that dashing between the page, between meaning or knowledge, is about occupying the minutiae of the inexpressible, breathlessness.
I’m not alone in this detective work. Jen Bervin, one of two editors of The Gorgeous Nothings, is a poet and visual artist engaged in archival work and artist books. Her Dickinson Composites series works as a restoration of Dickinson’s variant marks omitted in print.
Bervin scours the original Dickinson manuscripts, crosschecking them against the various print versions. Hers is a tactile reading, restoring what is omitted by embroidering the missing dashes and superfluous words in red silk onto blank cotton quilts. Bervin transcribes silence, makes documents of what is unsaid, in a form that invites touch, a tender reading.
This practice moves me beyond reason, perhaps because Bervin gives sense to Dickinson’s silences, her silencing, renders it into reason. Invites the viewer to reach out to what is usually kept out of reach. If there were a way to make my inexpressibility physical, to be, very literally, felt, what would that look and feel like?
LOOKING FOR CLUES
When I’m interested in the detective work that comes with reading Dickinson, am I actually interested in the detective work that comes with writing the self, that is, my own self?
Sifting through the poems which speak to me, this phrase, speaking to me, as though they were written with a singular reader in mind, isn’t that the thrill of Dickinson – that we are all hidden beneath the same cloth.
I search through the fascicles for that one crossed out word which could say everything I cannot, which actually won’t say it all, obscured by graphite, the soft grey we find waking in the middle of the night. The kind of light that throws you back into childhood, chairs scuffing, the adults in the other room.
A first, very literal memory of detective work: an Easter egg hunt around my grandparents’ apartment where I have been staying for what feels like forever, what was likely only a winter. I had, a few weeks prior, broken my left elbow attempting a backflip. I cannot remember the exact pain, just a sear, a kind of wiping out which propels me to my grandmother’s room, sobbing, sobbing, trying to explain that I have hurt my arm but not having enough of a grasp on Russian, trying to blend it with English. Moya arm moya arm. Your harm? harm? No no no-ing until I land on ruka, moya ruka, a word meaning both hand and arm. Your hand? your hand? she says, grabbing me firmly by the hand and shaking it, turning it over in confusion till I must be pink in the eyes and choking on my own spit because then she panics and then there is the hospital.
The Easter egg hunt is not a regular hunt. There are clues written on slips of paper hidden around the apartment, each clue leading me to another room, another clue, my grandmother stroking my hair as I read them aloud, occasionally correcting my pronunciation, until the final clue leads me to the kitchen where my mother is sat with an Easter egg in her lap. I had not seen her in weeks.
What do I recall from this reunion, where a forever has passed? Her hair is cropped, she is pale and watery, completely unlike herself, and I run to her and thump her in the chest with my plaster-cast-arm. I thump her and thump her, I can still remember the sweet scent of the cotton curdling out, the awful itch, I thump her, it must hurt me more than it hurts her, I thump her. I have no words.
Perhaps were my mother to read this she would deny it, deny it all, though my elbow aches every winter. Perhaps it isn’t relevant. What does this thump, that hurts me more than her, have to do with anorexia, or even Dickinson?
When Žižek writes of the Lacanian torture-house of language, he tells us that speech does not only register or express a traumatic psychic life, that the entry into speech is in itself a traumatic fact, and that at a certain key point, psychic turmoils themselves are a reaction to the trauma of dwelling in the “torture-house of language”. This makes me think of historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s view of the anorexic being part of a long line of women who use the control of their bodies as a symbolic means. Their own body language.
I had no words and no one to speak for me. How to evidence that Nothing. And Dickinson, who speaks for herself – Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted. Don’t make me tell you what she means.
I DON’T CARE IF EMILY DICKINSON WAS ANOREXIC OR NOT
Maybe I did care, when I was younger, not consciously, but I’m sure it was a part draw –
I was a magpie reader, building my nest of shiny things, hoping to find my own reflection in them, if only I gather more she will become clearer, that murky figure within the foil –
How could I resist Dickinson with poems like ‘I had been hungry, all the Years–’, ‘It would have starved a Gnat –’, ‘Deprived of other Banquet’. Poems which speak of what I am too afraid to, some which even reach God in their symbolic hunger –
Art thou the thing I wanted?
Begone – my Tooth has grown –
Affront a minor palate
Thou could’st not goad so long –
I tell thee while I waited –
The mystery of Food
Increased till I abjured it
Subsisting now like God –
In my research, sifting through a tedium of psychiatric studies, I find anorexics referred to as impulsive, methodical, secretive, manipulative, perfectionists, distrusting, and constantly worried about harm. These strike me on a personal level as both true and flattening. I see myself ironed out into a checklist, each quality drawn across a rib in red ink.
What I never see mentioned is that the anorexic is a fanatic, that this checklist of qualities observed are the aftershock of a fanaticism, and at the risk of romanticising the illness I feel it necessary to say that yes, it does feel like God, to be that empty and for a moment still alive. You become a knife’s edge, or a loaded gun. I am awake in the place where women die, to borrow from Jenny Holzer.
Anorexia is not about the body; it is about the unnameable thing that the body impedes the anorexic from attaining. It is the inexpressible.
On the days when I did not reach that nameless feeling, which far outnumbered the days I did, I was beach wrack drifting through life. I was my heaviest self, unable to lift an eyebrow, open my mouth to speak. I read poems, Dickinson. I magpied.
Now writing about this particular draw to Dickinson, I find I was not alone. Speculation abounds, particularly in literary criticism of the 80s and 90s, as to the meaning of Dickinson’s hunger. But these readings stretch beyond the sparsity of her verse, the allusions to deprivation (both literal or otherwise), and the wonderful stick figures to be found in her dashes – features I would consider under the bracket of anorexic aesthetics and not necessarily indicative of a wider pathology – to retroactively diagnosing Dickinson as anorexic, taking her white dress and self-isolation as its symptoms.
This approach isn’t far off from the alienating reception Dickinson experienced in her day – see the well-known letter of 1881 by a Mabel Loomis Todd, who refers to Dickinson as a character, it, the Myth and the climax of all (her) family oddity – and it certainly isn’t literary.
What is there to gain from reading an anorexic Dickinson? Aren’t the thousands of fragments she wrote and left behind enough? What is our devouring, this bottomless need for more, functioning in place of?
I have the freedom now of reading Dickinson’s poems for what they are: poems. Complex; coded; at once tactile and abstract; sharp; silently explosive; at times frightening in their detachment but always, ultimately, poems. This reading is a kinder sea.
STOPPING AND STARTING
The nature of this project is one of stops and starts. After writing this sentence, I close my laptop and do not return to my work until the following morning. Sometimes the stops are far longer. Here, after writing this, as though suddenly reminded, I skulk away again for a day, then two. I do this when words feel too much.
I use this phrase, too much, when explaining to loved ones why I am not writing. There is often disappointment when I claim too much, because I know that they love me for writing. They won’t say they are disappointed; it is just the slight frown hiding itself, eyes looking anywhere else, which also renders language too much and I step away again.
But perhaps it is not words that are too much as it is the present tense, so key to the telling of anorexia. When I write of what happened, it is more than a re-opened wound, it is what Emily Berry calls further injury. I am presently harmed by speaking it.
Writing after recovery – which is the wrong word, it does not mean what it says it means in the context of the anorexic, no such switch that flips from SICK to OK – is a kind of elegy work where, to borrow from Berry again, a veiling has occurred in the process (but) the death is still going on. It is a monument built on irrational grief, we shall remain inconsolable to magpie Freud – for that sense of control, for when my body felt like purest sunlight, I could hear it ringing, and then the terror of myself, what I was capable of; but also for the sting that comes with constantly cold fingers, or the all-encompassing silence, that thing which I absolutely could not speak of, the only thing I ever thought about – how could anyone miss it, a life perverted. To repent, Anne Carson tells us, means to draw from its Latin roots of paenitare meaning cause to repent and its later Old French revival repentir, wherein a word is made for the act of repentance. What Carson calls the pain again.
There are thoughts which do not leave me, even after all these years. Here I stop for a lunch break, queue in the canteen, eavesdrop on a teenager and her father discussing the calorie content of the meal I plan on ordering, that is too much, order it anyway when I reach the front, listen to them drop silent. Then I come back to the text to write about my meal, the complete loss of joy I find in each bite, like something in my mouth has died.
Scholarship on anorexia understands recovery to be a total cessation of symptoms, which encompasses weight and menses, eating behaviours, and thought patterns around body image. Or it might think of anorexics as the following: recovered (total cessation of symptoms), relapsed (symptomatic), or dead. For the anorexic-in-recovery, if that term can still then be applied, these categories become another form of restriction. Either I never think about the rolls of my stomach or I am anorexic. I never become quiet after dinner with friends or I am dead. It doesn’t matter if I have stopped weighing myself, calorie counting, if I have maintained regular menstruation for years. By the logic of popular scholarship, the anorexic must completely obliterate that part of her life, in essence erase herself, to be considered recovered.
Given these confines, the anorexic is presented with two choices: she erases herself so as not to be the relapsed, or she remains firmly the anorexic. Language mandates that either she stops or she starts. What the cultural anthropologist Merav Shohet finds is that these choices become reflected in the anorexic’s speech, in what they present as their illness-recovery narratives. Shohet finds that the anorexic who considers herself fully recovered speaks of her illness as belonging to a past self from whom she has a clean break, a stranger rooted in the past to whom the fully recovered cannot relate.
Whereas the struggling recovered anorexic speaks of past, present and imagined future selves (…) as continuous and conflicted versions of an ambivalent person who is sometimes cast as an agent of her life, while other times remaining an experiencing patient. The struggling recovered understands that anorexia is always present tense. This puts her in an awkward position with language. Because to be honest is to break with the expressible.
Here I stop again because I feel myself on the cusp of entering inexpressible territory, the writer abandoned by words. When I return it is as if I am back from the dead, a space where I have been inutile, unmoving, although this is untrue, there is plenty more movement in not writing than in writing. When I am not writing I am walking for hours laughing with friends pulling my hair out I am a haptic being distracted with each motion from the void which meaning falls into.
Then a word, a string, appears and I can pull at it pull at it until I am normal again, typing at my desk, telling you, the reader, that by letting you into my stops and starts, I am letting you a little closer to the nature of writing anorexia, the thrashing between silence and scream. Part of this can be explained by the confines of language. The other, a fear of repentance, of producing the pain again. A fear of the present tense, wounded.
A NON-EXISTENT GOD
Amongst friends I laugh about the lack of moderation we encountered on tumblr as a teenagers, wild shit, each scroll initiating us into early adulthood. Softcore porn swiftly devolving into the stronger stuff, hair and makeup guides leading us to blogs dedicated to weight loss, it is seamless, like missing a stair. The pro-ana sect of tumblr is only ever a few clicks away. I am looking at a post of Alexa Chung’s Glastonbury looks then one scroll, two, and I find a post about thigh gaps, a must-have, thinspo.
I was never an active participant in the pro-ana community, is that the right word, community, a group of girls absolutely in it for themselves. I found them scary. Perhaps I saw too much of myself in the sharp language they used to describe their own bodies, or their friends, the disgust they felt, so visceral, I know, I don’t want to know.
But they had their fanaticism, too. A pro-ana blog was a blog dedicated to anorexia, or what was referred to as simply Ana, a personification of the illness they served, a kind of goddess. They even drew fan-art of the deity Ana, the cliché of her sprawling limbs, an intangible queen. Here another example of the anorexic forging identity through paradox and symbolism, I feel like a non-existent god, I will create a non-existent god.
And while the bloggers mostly spoke in tongues, they also offered advice on getting closer to Ana. A how-to for anorexia. These posts I did read, at the start, until I was set off on my own mission. And so a part of stopping and starting now as I write these years comes from the hesitancy to speak of specifics, to give too much away. Both for my own sake, so as not to disturb a soft amnesia I maintain like a sick sleeping animal, but also for the sake of the reader who might be drawn to the blogs, consciously or not, for guidance. I cannot tell you, I should not tell you. To not describe, to not give specifics, these are the disasters of a writer. I fail every time I do not tell, and yet I must not tell.
How to continue such a project? to write the inexpressible? Do I make like Dickinson, scrawl forever and deny the words light? Dickinson, who Susan Howe tells us, knew that the language of the heart has quite another grammar, one grounded in humility and hesitation, where poems have no titles or numbers, no forced order, where conventional punctuation is abolished and replaced with a hush of hesitation, the marker of breath and breathing. All of this I say all of this is a strategy for the inexpressible. And then, inhabiting that space, writing and writing until there are a thousand of these whispers, she chooses to keep them to herself. She renders a language entirely her own, writing letters for herself. This language is self-sufficient, at a remove, a whole bunch of Moly.
Superiority to Fate
Is difficult to gain
’Tis not conferred of Any
But possible to earn
A pittance at a time
Until to Her surprise
The Soul with strict economy
Subsist till Paradise.
Through this forged system, Emily owns her void. She makes herself into a God.
Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a poet of both British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut pamphlet Ways of Healing was a winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize. Her debut poetry collection Food for the Dead, which contextualises the current war in Ukraine within a wider historical background, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2024. It won an Eric Gregory Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hull.
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