One way of distinguishing the short prose poems of Dominique Hecq’s Endgame with No Ending from, say, flash fiction, would be to argue that while flash fiction’s centre of gravity is narrative, for these prose poems, the centre of gravity is language (or writing) itself. This is not to say that Hecq’s poems are just ‘writing about writing’, but that they address or encompass the materialities of language, textuality, and the conditions of possibility for writing.

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There is no tranquillity in Claire Gaskin’s fourth poetry collection, Ismene’s Survivable Resistance. Though Gaskin draws on Sophocles’ plot and constellation of characters, this is not a tragedy. The tragedy has already occurred. As in Eurydice Speaks, Gaskin assumes the voice of the voiceless in a contemporary setting. Here Ismene is a poet grappling with her traumatic past. The reader of her poems is in the position of witness. 

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