Cusp: Feminist Writings on Bodies, Myths & Magic // Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology is a distorting starting point. I look at the table in my room and think of it not just a table, but as Sara Ahmed's table, approaching lines and queer slants, repetitive actions and (dis)embodied spaces. The endless possibilities of this table I now turned towards. Perhaps, this is why, as I placed my new pink copy of Cusp upon it, it seemed like a companion of sorts, a phenomenological object, a drawing together.

Our bodies, like tables, can also deviate, lack definition and break down language. This happens all the time. Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain describes this as torture but queer bodies and women's bodies can deviate outside of this too, being haunted, ill and disorientated in a society of "other" bodies that try to suppress them.

These bodies especially offer us new multi-linear ways to experiment in feminist writing and Manchester-based Ache Magazine knows this all too well. Cusp is a culmination of that project, often surreal, literary writing experiments that push the ways we perceive and exist with(in) bodies and spaces. There is a wide scope here, of fiction, poetry and prose which touch on interstices. Pieces of writing meticulously put together in a disoriented collection. 

Camilla Grudova's bodies are haunted furnishings that hold. While Rose Higham-Stainton's bodies are girls who expose. And yet, each self-contained piece follows one mutable, and at times, inner dialogue. 

There are bodies in pain, like Memoona Zahid's astounding poem A Fluorescent Feeling: 

       my futures gnaw at my bones,

with an diagnosed ache

And bodies displaced, like Sharelene Teo's often hilarious short story I Can Change!:

Red wine turned me into an aging Stanislavski trained actor who would not stop emoting. White wine turned me into a racist white woman with a golf tan. And so on.

And in all directions Cusp offers up these bodies in rich and varied writing. It nauseates, queers perspectives and opens new, exciting ways to exist in a space that no longer stays put, the interstices of writing.