Rain at three splits the bed in half,
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‘Rain at three splits the bed in half, / cracks at windows like horsemen blistering / through a century of hibernation.’
Rain at three splits the bed in half,
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays and fiction. Her most recent books are Girls are Coming Out of the Woods, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for poetry, and a novel, Small Days and Nights, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. For fifteen years she worked as a dancer with the Chandralekha Group in Chennai. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry, A God at the Door, has just been published by Bloodaxe Books. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and otherwise lives in Tamil Nadu, India.
Photograph © Carlo Pizzati
‘A breast just casually hanging around, being a functional exocrine gland, enjoying the sun? Impossible.’
Tishani Doshi on women’s rights in India.
‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’
‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’
‘Culture has been bound up since the beginning with extraction.’
The editor introduces the issue.
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