Description
‘Miriam Gamble evokes place by writing about its thresholds. Her essays bring us to the ‘bounds of the known’ by way of a devotional attention to the particularities of language—its beauty, its violence, its ability to make and unmake the world.’ —Sarah Bernstein
‘She can be witty, cool, angry, defiant, and loving, obsessed with detail and panoramically capacious.’ —Padraig Regan
In Little Acts of Vigilance, the first collection of essays published by The Lifeboat, poet Miriam Gamble attends with precision to that which is often invisible. Inhabiting a space where the legacy of the prose poem and the propulsion of the modern lyric essay meet, these works defy easy categorisation, demanding only your attention. Punctured with linguistic acrobatics and a poet’s feel for rhythm and sound, these works oscillate between bawdy narrative and philosophical enquiry—varying modes of address cast the net of this book impossibly wide, as it considers questions as tangible as class modality and as elusive as that which exists, unknowable, within the self. Miriam Gamble is looking outward and inward simultaneously, writing the dilapidation of street corners and pubs with the same musicality as she writes the tiny feline-like creature that stalks the mind’s corridors and embodies self-disdain, self-destruction. These are essays of art, intimacy, paranoia and poetry.