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"What did I think I would write about the club, before I went? Did I think it would be, God forbid, emblematic of something? Some bright new moment of optimism, the grievances of the past forgotten, all things on the up? Did I think we would spend our warmups talking about the Good Friday Agreement or what it felt like to be part of the ‘post-peace process generation’?"
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"A park is a promise. It is a green space all the more loveable because of the will involved in its fabrication. If it is wild, it is wild by design. A park is an offer of enlarged freedom, an invitation to exist simply, to simply exist."
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"The bull stands on a patch of grass. It looks straight on, head turned to the side so that we can see one eye only, a tag in the right ear, a ring in the nose, the drop of saliva that is falling, suspended, from its soaked mouth. An extraordinary heft."
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"To Irish eyes, the landscape bore the mark of unreality: palm trees lining the promenades, possums peering out from gum trees, those rows upon rows of Victorian houses with their verandahs, their ornamented parapets... At home, it was the peak of summer, one of the hottest on record, but here it was 'Christmas in July’: mulled wine and gingerbread hawked from carts; fake snow pumped out of machines.'
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"For everything, there is a season. This belief animates Jordan Casteel’s first UK solo show, an exhibition concerned with ephemerality and small instances of connection."
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"What does freedom mean in this context? When we now act without communal solidarity, who gets to be free? Who remains oppressed; whose oppression is deepened? These questions were largely ignored in the UK as the government first dallied over acting to stop the spread of Coronavirus, and then scrambled to piece together an adequate response, all too little too late."
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"Here, the past is not past. Violence abides even in the atmosphere. In the face of historical atrocities and present-day injustices, this is a collection which acknowledges that the language of its own making is already compromised. Sinclair’s achievement is to show us why poetry matters anyway, why it is, in fact, indispensable."
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"But even inside life goes on, if it can, as it must, and with it a first-year literature course in a Belfast university, and with that, this week’s reading: Cormac McCarthy."
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"In some ways, this is a book about the process of coming to see—coming to understand—the recent past, and, to redirect a phrase from Joan Didion, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. But it is also a book about making sense of childhood, about trying to imagine a future, about time itself."
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"It occurred to me then that Mahon’s are the kind of poems with which one spends a lifetime, the kind of poems that might reveal themselves to you over years: wrongfooting you, surprising you, delighting you. The best of them are poems not only ‘for our times’ but for all times, for all seasons."
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"In this book, a slim new volume from Princeton University Press’s Writers on Writers series, R. F. Foster doesn’t seek to radically recast the Heaney narrative, but gives us something of a primer, a 'Heaney 101'."
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"When I meet Dublin band Pillow Queens in a pub and pizza place in the city in August, the conversation ranges from the city’s housing crisis to the campaign to end direct provision, Ireland’s widely criticised system for housing asylum seekers. It takes a while for the reason for our meeting—the release of their exceptional debut album—to get a look in."
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"There are shades here of Angela Carter, Lydia Davis and Miranda July, but Sweeney’s style is all her own. Reading this book in a single sitting feels a bit like getting giddy from eating too many Easter eggs, so moreish is each one of these stories."
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"James Baldwin described the predicament like this: 'People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.' Terrance Hayes’s latest collection makes visible the outlines of the trap of history by pushing against the constraints of the 14-line sonnet form."
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"Rarely has there been such an intense spotlight on Irish writing―and Irish women’s writing, in particular―as there is today. "
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"For upwards of a year, the jumper was everywhere. In cities and towns across Ireland, people sported it as they went grocery shopping, took classes, met friends at bars, picked up their kids from school."
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"It’s a dismal Friday night in January, and outside The Menagerie, just off Belfast’s Ormeau Road, rain is lashing the streets. Inside, it’s a riot of colour; the club is packed with people of all ages. The music is as diverse as the clientele, running the gamut between northern soul, disco and house."
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"I met Dick in Simon’s Place Café, Dublin, on a rainy afternoon in mid-October, shortly after the show had ended. It had struck a chord in the city."
—‘Interview: Vivienne Dick’, Tangerine, Winter 2017