by Suzanna Slack

A Book of the Year selection by Sophie Collins for The White Review Books of 2022

A book of meditations on the construction of motherhood, gender and the carceral family. It is about the house, it’s about sex work and reproductive labour, and it is most of all a reflection of how we might think about love. ​

Reviews

‘This explicit situating of memoir-like material within a wider political, cultural and intellectual framework will be familiar to those who have been following writers such as Chris Kraus, Paul Preciado or Kate Zambreno over the last decade. […] A work of catharsis not just for the writer but also the reader – we are invited to do our own “memory work” and given a literary style that can provide a frame- work. If we don’t want to do that, however, we can just let Slack’s reflections sit with us, accepting the invitation to consider how concepts such as “motherhood” and “queerness” complicate each other, taking her work not as a dictation but as an invitation to dialogue, or at least our own rumination.’ —Juliet Jacques, for Schirn Magazine

“I’m obsessed with this original, innovative & boundary breaking novel by Suzanna Slack, recommended by Sophie Collins and Mount Florida Books. Motherhood, queerness, class, suffering & love, in one of the freshest voices I’ve read in years. A sharp wind blowing over broken glass.” —Rebecca Tamás

​’There’s an achy, startling quality in The Poor Children that’s almost unbearable – but there is also magic, beauty, care, wonder and a hardcore honesty deft at unravelling the queer intricacies of staying alive, against all odds, in a heterosexist white supremacist world we didn’t make and yet keep waking up to over & over. The Poor Children reads like a playbook for unmaking and remaking our rotten, stinky world, stretching and bending what’s left of it to host ever more life, holding all living things from the very big to the very small. Suzanna Slack cuts through the dull illusions surrounding our modern day myths about money, marriage and motherhood to tell us tales we desperately need about failed social systems and slow collective healing. Read it now.’ —Dr. Sofia Varino, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English & American Studies, University of Potsdam

About the publisher

VF Press is a co-operative small press which aims to prioritise neurodiversity, the consequences of racialised state violence, transfemininities and children’s rights. They publish poetry, theory, creative non-fiction, and work that is not easy to categorise.

We want to see an end to stale and harmful pedagogical and publishing pathways and we are hoping to see the internet used differently, or (if necessary) less.

Publisher: VF Press
Published: May, 1 2021
Format: Book, A5
Binding: Paperback
Interior: Black & White
Pages: 164
ISBN: 9781527261747