Olive Parker, Kas Pietrzak, Sophie Barshall, Jane Cooper, Alexander Raubo
Recitations

Bones let her do this until she was sure she had stopped bleeding. Then, laughing maniacally, she wrenched the Angel up by the fat of her cheeks. When they were both standing, she stared into the Angel’s mouth. “They confirmed me,” she shouted into it, her leprous tongue leering against the girl’s blackened teeth and dancing over spoiled, shaking lips.

Then she dropped the Angel down onto the ground and limped a cackling danse macabre down the alley onto the busy street, where she vanished into the crowd without looking back.

Olive Parker

The word, blood, body. Is writing that was once both divine and flesh, now only flesh?

Communion with past literature has lapsed into presentism. The virtues of the 20th-century avant-garde have ossified into platitudes – spuriously invoked by those wishing to claim literary accession. But even if the laudation on the back of a yellowing Penguin Modern Classic could just as easily apply to a newly published collection of short stories, do both truly occupy comparable roles in their respective cultures?

Recitations brings together new, unpublished writing at the foundation of a living literary culture. As the author’s words are spoken aloud, the spirit and the embodied are forced to meet once more.

Recitations is organised with Rose Lyddon.