Alex Macdonald – författare

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find that the era of competitive capitalism is long over, replaced by an era of co-operation. Wealth is produced by an “industrial army” and every citizen receives the same wage.

This edition contains a rich selection of appendices, including excerpts from Bellamy’s Equality and other writings; contemporary responses (by William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others); excerpts from utopian works by Morris and William Dean Howells; and an excerpt from Henry George’s Progress and Poverty.

Knowing This Has Changed My Ending is an approach to and mastering of a specific domestic. The poems stand by windows, obsessed by and yet strangely insulated from the world through the glass – a world in which objects cluster together for warmth, for the friendship they need as proof against life lived in the exposed and raw places. Matters of shapeshifting and disappearance recur and reinvent themselves, often within a single poem, the reader increasingly subject to their movements. ‘Days become a series of rooms’, and the waking up inside them is variously stultifying, frightening, hopeful, enclosing and obsessive. MacDonald’s structures are electronic in their linking of source to expense, and the close wiring of this pamphlet pulses with energy and focus. These are warnings ignored and passed over, of forecasting strange new weather, of the transformative power of boundaries – at the day’s cusp, in the reflective glass, in thresholds stepped over and confessions made or unmade. ‘I want to wake up very early’, MacDonald writes, ‘to see how the day changes’. And then he does.