Alexandra Sashe - Antibodies

Published 2013. Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins.
ISBN 9781848612839. [Download a PDF sampler from this book here.]

The title of the collection — a term borrowed from anatomy and transposed onto the area of human relations (one's relationship with oneself as well as with others) — should be read in the ambivalence which it spontaneously suggests — on the one hand, it is an opposition between bodies, a you as an anti-I, both on the emotive and physical levels; and, on the other hand, now taken in its proper sense, it is antibodies which ensure healing. The tension of this ambivalence forms the axis of the collection.

However, a careful reader may notice a gradual change in the tonality as the language becomes more elastic towards the second part of the book, the antithetical connotation giving way to the remedying one.

For the author, this body of work constitutes, in a certain sense, her own body — for a creative work, and a literary creation par excellence, may well be regarded as the creator's anamnesis. Each poem speaks of this or that symptom, brings to light what is hidden, exorcises what as yet resists light… And, as for the traces consigned to the dark, the author presumes they also fulfil their part adding to the chiaroscuro of her portrait. In short, art never ceases to shape the artist and – to hold him a mirror. However, this body, once accomplished and thus exteriorised, is shed as skin.

And so each time it is necessarily the question of re-birth. And—so goes the wish of the author—may it be thus for the reader also.

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