What is Karen Enns Reading?

I finished reading Flights, Olga Tokarczuk’s brilliant, complicated novel, a few weeks ago, but it’s still very much on my mind. I’m so intrigued by the structure of the book; the narrative is constructed entirely of fragments that work, it seems to me, the way metaphors do in a complex poem, layering themselves, sometimes obviously interconnecting, sometimes barely touching, always building meaning and reference through the shifting textures. There is intellectual work to be done by the reader, for sure. Beautifully translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. I’m now reading an earlier work of Tokarzcuk’s: Primeval and Other Times.

The bookmarked poetry books at the top of my present pile include Paulette Jiles’ vibrant Waterloo Express (I can’t believe I haven’t read her work before now), and Kyeren Regehr’s hot-off-the-press Cult Life with its dense, wonderfully charged lines.

For clear-eyed guidance in these anxious times, I’ve just started reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.