Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 132: Possession
Summer 2015
In this issue, Oliver Bullough travels to Ukraine and Crimea in the wake of revolution; Kerry Howley writes about cage fighting and giving birth; Molly Brodak remembers her father, a compulsive gambler and failed bank robber; and Bella Pollen describes being visited – repeatedly – by an incubus. Here are fifteen takes on the human drive to possess – a person, a home, a territory – and the many ways we become possessed – by ideas, by desires, by spirits.
Cover image: © Julie Cockburn, The Bear, 2014
Altered found photograph
Courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London
From this Issue
|Granta 132
After Maidan
Oliver Bullough
‘A woman asked the steward behind the registration desk if our flight to Moscow was domestic or international. “We are still working on that,” the man answered.’
|Granta 132
Epithalamium
Greg Jackson
‘Hara had stumbled on a kind of play, as if they were sisters left alone by their parents for the first time to explore the different ways a day could be deconstructed.‘
|Granta 132
The Cage of You
Kerry Howley
‘They treated their bodies like some exotic animal they’d found fast asleep, beings they needed to wake to truly know.’
|Granta 132
Poem Conveyed
Jillian Weise
‘And now that he is body-less, / he speaks through us. / You could say. Although / I myself have not caught / a Pope.’
|Granta 132
This is New
Marc Bojanowski
‘None of this would have happened if I’d just taken a deep breath, suppressed my emotions and said to the young woman, “Leave. Now.”‘
|Granta 132
The Emotional Life of Plants
Rae Armantrout
An exciton consists / of the escaped negative / (electron) / and the positive hole / it left behind.
|Granta 132
Old-Age Rage
Daisy Jacobs
‘He’s not himself’, Mum says in the kitchen. Well, who is he then? Is he 40 per cent of his young self? Ten? Do I still have to love him as much as ever, this 90 per cent stranger?
|Granta 132
Open Water
Deb Olin Unferth
She had already imagined it all, so much so that when she finally did see him, she felt unable to speak.
