Catriona Strang – författare

Unfuckable Lardass reverts the patriarchy’s gaze. It began as an attempt to refract and undercut an outrageous insult allegedly lobbed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel – an egregious demonstration of the framing of women in reductive and sexualized terms ignoring their existence as subjects of their own complex histories. As such, Unfuckable Lardass is fuelled by the energy of grief and rage, counterpoised by moments of love and hope. Drawing on language from a wide range of sources – including European witch trials, Marx, Darwin, Renaissance and popular music, and common profanity, as well as from the author’s experience of post-reproductivity and of carrying out caring labour during declines, deaths, and the COVID-19 lockdown – Strang’s sixth book of poetry not only refuses the objectifying gaze but, more importantly, turns towards the great and expanding richness of alternate possibilities.

Catriona Strang expertly “fabricates her own reality” in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms. we need not gulf doubt nor gist-pierce our place whatever grip or drib we might or mean Dear Proust, / You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be ­constituted through art. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.