To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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‘Holding voices together in common cause’
FRAN LOCK recommends a poetry anthology that spotlights our varied experiences under the multiple oppressions of global capitalism
(L to R) Istvan Vas, Kathleen Kenny and Anna Greki
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Smokestack Lightning
edited by Andy Croft
Smokestack Books £9.99
AT A RECENT event celebrating the launch of Culture Matters’s The Cry of the Poor: An Anthology of Radical Writing About Poverty (2021) I got chatting to one of our contributors about the perils and the pleasures of the anthology form. He suggested that a large number of contemporary anthologies fail — as both literature and politics — because the claims they make for themselves are so grossly exaggerated, or because their organising conceit is artificial and painfully forced. Or both. I tend to agree.
At their worst, anthologies can be prone to the kinds of essentialising value judgement that implicitly exclude the many poetic voices who do not conform to the narrow prescriptive dictates of “house style,” or else are not comfortably cradled within the arbitrary limits of this or that definition.
What counts, for example, as radical or as innovative writing? Who gets to decide who qualifies as working class? As neurodiverse? As British? As queer? Who polices the borders of all our classed, gendered, and otherwise vexed categories of belonging?
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