woman | folk
Karan Chambers
salò press
This pamphlet came to my attention through recommendation, which means I had no idea what to expect from it. When it arrived, I had a brief scan through the blurb, and the word brutal caught my eye. With a title that hints at myth and folklore, and the implied gentleness that is difficult to put aside when considering female gender norms, I looked forward to seeing how these seemingly opposite ideas might be reconciled. Plus, if there’s one quality I consistently enjoy in poems, it’s brutality.
The first thing that stands out in this collection is Karan’s use of language. She has a gift for pairing words to create new and specific meanings. Right from the start, you get combinations like darkknuckled, softkeyed promise, and shadowstood. This signature features throughout the sequence of poems, and always feels like it is adding to the precise feelings the poet wants to convey.
Interestingly, for a set of poems which are often character driven, most are written in third person. Perhaps this is intention - these are often the poems of women unable to speak for themselves. However, there is still little space between the reader and the women who inhabit each poem. The repeated use of the phrase here is... anchors the reader in each scene - ‘here is fog like a hand over your mouth’ (here be monsters), ‘here is the night on a pen-nib’ (siren), ‘here is the sea in an iris’ (selkie). Each image is immediate and unflinching - you’re not given time to look away before the next arrives.
The ‘I’ does exist for some characters, such as the fisher queen whose frustration at her king is well inhabited - she refers to his stupid little boat with biting simplicity. Elsewhere, a goddess prays for the women who’ve come before her, equally well-voiced.
The brutality is held through the poems in a number of ways. First in the subject matter: the treatment of women is shown in direct and often painful ways. Then in the form: Karan uses short, clipped lines and a lot of full stops, which creates a fast, almost breathless rhythm. Finally it’s in the bodies of water which are almost characters in their own right, appearing and re-appearing through the poems as something wild, dangerous, and alive.
This is a strong collection if you're interested in vivid imagery, poems that don’t hold back, and a generous presence of witches and myth. I’m glad I took a chance on it.
Karan was kind enough to answer some questions about her pamphlet...
What was the first poem you wrote for this pamphlet? How did it set the tone for the rest?
This is a slightly tricky question to answer because although ‘siren’ was the first poem I wrote using the “here is” format, and really leaning into the compound-word imagery, ‘witch’ actually grew from a much older poem that I cut up and repurposed when I realised some of the imagery resonated with the themes I was working with.
Which poem in the collection was the hardest to write, and why?
Probably ‘witch’! It went through so many iterations, it’s completely unrecognisable from its first draft and I still don’t feel like it’s 100% finished! I’m not sure why it was so difficult to write, maybe because I had a very specific vision in mind for it, which I could never quite capture.
You use inventive compound words. How do you approach creating language and description?
For me, language in poetry should be about the feeling it creates. I love how malleable language is and I like to see how far I can push the limits of it. Part of the motivation behind this pamphlet was to try to describe experiences and situations that have been shied away from or concealed behind closed doors, and I felt like I needed a new way of writing about them. The language I use is deliberately complex and often overwhelming, almost a barrage of imagery at times, to convey the all-encompassing intensity and trauma of many of the narratives.
There’s a striking use of repetition like “here is…” throughout the collection. Was this a conscious structural device from the start, or something that emerged?
A bit of both! It started as an attempt at naming and speaking about the unspoken in a more detached, observational way and it grew from there to become almost an incantation that reverberated through the collection.
What’s a line or idea from the collection that you hope readers don’t miss?
From ‘woman: free’: “your own body has always been the answer.”
If you could sit down for a drink and a chat with one of the women in this collection, who would it be and why?
Oh, this is a great question! I would like to sit down with my witch from ‘spelling for not-being’ and ‘spell for being’ and find out how she’s doing. I hope that she’s found her peace as I imagined she did in ‘witch’.
How do you like to write?
How I like to write and how I actually write are very different things! ‘woman | folk’ was written in the gaps I could find while parenting three small children; most of the poems were written in the post-partum period with my third child, generally on my notes app while breastfeeding, nap-trapped, or pushing a buggy to try and get him to sleep. It was a chaotic, intense period and I’m incredibly proud of the pamphlet that came from it.
How I like to write is in silence, on my laptop, preferably with a very strong coffee and loads and loads of time to think. However, I think I write best under the very specific pressure that juggling children brings – when I have a window for writing I have to grab it with both hands and write like I’ll never get another chance (because I might not!)
What do you do when a poem won’t behave?
I send it to my wonderful writing group for their thoughts and often the addition of fresh eyes allows a breakthrough that I wouldn’t achieve on my own. On the rare occasion this doesn’t help, I put it away for a while and sometimes the distance helps and something random will spark a way in or a reframe. For the really stubborn ones, I cut it up and turn it in to something new!