I am out in the snowy woods,
trying to find a signal
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'the trees / are slender in the way that things / are almost, though not quite / absent'
I am out in the snowy woods,
trying to find a signal
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
John Burnside lives in East Fife, Scotland, where he teaches at the University of St. Andrews. His fifth novel, The Devil’s Footprints, and a collection of poems, Gift Songs, were published by Jonathan Cape in spring 2007.
More about the author →‘I was marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara / and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say / who Genet was.’
‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’
‘Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it – and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet’s task is to suggest that it needn’t be.’
‘I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature.’
Home is makeshift. Everything we build, everything we name, everything we hold dear and would not have taken from us is temporary and in constant need of re-imagining.
‘9/11 was the bullet to the powder keg of an already heated domestic conflict.’
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