Calibre Prize
Hold your nerve
I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.
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Like much feminist performance art since the 1960s, Casey Jenkins’s latest performance piece, titled IMMACULATE, centres on a female body – Jenkins’s own. IMMACULATE is a performance that documents the legal and commonly practised process of self-insemination in the home.
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Three sections at the beginning of Marion Campbell’s second novel, Not Being Miriam, initiate its preoccupations and problems. They relate incidents from the childhood of Bess Valentine, its major character. In the first and shortest, Bess creates a transforming ritual, a childish game with significant narrative implications. Bess strips herself and Sean, paints their bodies with clay, the children enter the water which washes away the clay; then she dresses in Sean’s boxer shorts and clothes him in her bubble bathers.
In the street
of my childhood
nothing is reliable.