"[...] staircase of wounds"

"We know from Emily Dickinson that true poetry is painful. A real poem made her 'feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,' which by all evidence she took to be a good thing: 'I know that is poetry.' If it is, then so much the better for Harm, Hillary Gravendyk’s first book of poems, whose descriptions will disfigure sensitive readers much more than commonplace poetic lobotomy. Her book is full of pain: a 'skein of plastic braided into the mouth,' 'organs flat as mirrors,' a 'throat closed by what opens inside it,' '[t]he kind of hunger that swallows you,' '[b]reath, threading its tiny needles,' and a 'bright needle, punched through the neck.'
     While at times she can be lightheartedly funny — 'I was promised only good things,' Gravendyk writes in 'Appetite' in the voice of Appetite itself, petulant and credulous like a child — mostly she is out to evoke serious pain. Gravendyk’s work isn’t dramatic, but it evokes drama; she doesn’t despair, but she offers few of the usual hopes."
— Adam Plunkett, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Estrangement in a Strange Land

"I was up in Cheltenham this weekend at the Literature festival, where I chaired several events – including one with SF legend Brian Aldiss, still going strong at 86, and calling to mind in voice and appearance a benign, left-wing John Cleese. When asked by an audience member why he'd tackled the subject of state-endorsed torture in his 2007 novel, Harm, he explained the novel's political charge on the grounds that 'I really do believe that the people in charge at the minute are - well, shits.' Amen to that.
     Anyway, my final event on Saturday was with SF-legend-in-the-making China Miéville, to discuss his latest novel, Embassytown. We talked about the novel for about half an hour (read it: it's excellent) before the conversation veered onto the evergreen territory of the Booker prize's wilful neglect of science fiction. It's a well-rehearsed argument (I went to an event at Cheltenham last year in which Miéville and John Mullan squared off entertainingly over it), but we ran down the familiar points: SF novels are generally sold not on their literary credentials but on the ideas they explore; the Booker is a genre (litfic) award itself, but just doesn't admit it; SF novels DO make it onto Booker shortlists (Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but once shortlisted they're not called science fiction any more (cf Kingsley Amis's oft-quoted distich: ' "SF's no good!" they bellow till we're deaf./ "But this looks good … Well, then, it's not SF!" ')."
— Sarah Crown, Guardian
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