A horizon line: flat style in contemporary women’s poetry

This essay explores a contemporary mode of ‘flat style’ which is so overloaded – with feeling, language and detail that it turns counter-intuitively into something numb detached, seems to shut down further discussion, create impasse. It focuses on three books poetry by women, published Faber Emily Berry’s Stranger, Baby (2017), Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland (2019), Sophie Collins’s Who Is Mary Sue? (2018). While flat style takes different forms in Allen, Berry, Collins, all cases refers writing positioned relation confession or revelation, performs its own indifference how received. involves causing (gendered) trouble refusing the labour responsiveness reader. For intricate collation details, blurring any subject out vision. postures poetic melodrama state themselves ‘flatly’, without apology. Finally, Kingdomland, setting up, then dissolving, lyric potential (its extroverted impulses towards apostrophe) an unsettling always conversation possibility disappointment. Flat now may hold itself aloof, refuse intimacy, as way pre-empting, resisting surviving assumed readerly inattentiveness.