Nearly 4.5) Grief Is the Thing with Feathers meets Girl, Woman, Other would be my marketing shorthand for this one. Poet Salena Godden’s debut novel is a fresh and fizzing work, passionate about exposing injustice but also about celebrating simple joys, and in the end it’s wholly life-affirming despite a narrative stuffed full of deaths real and imagined. Salena Godden’s debut novel is as much an affirmation of life as a tale of death, writes Wendy Erskine.

From a poet whose most famous poems (widely performed by her and by others at many protest marches from ER to #MeToo to BLM) include “Pessimism is for Lightweights” (which also provided the title of her published collection) and Courage is a Muscle” – its is no surprise that this is actually a book which despite its darkness has a message about optimism, endurance, activism and courage.I just— it feels so juvenile to me. This is the kind of unpolished, stream of consciousness poetry you scribble in your teenage math journal while blasting Fall Out Boy. Join us in conversation with Annabelle Hirsch and Salena Godden talking about Annablle's remarkable book A History of Women in 101 Objects: A Walk Through Female History.A vital and beautiful collection that tells a new story of female history through a hundred and one objects, some extraordinary and others everyday. Told in a laconic, compelling interior monologue, Weather follows the wide-ranging concerns of its librarian protagonist, Lizzie, from the quotidian – a painful knee, her son’s academic progress at school – to the profound – the election of Trump and a looming climate change disaster. Lizzie’s former university professor is now the popular host of an apocalyptic podcast, and Lizzie agrees to answer her conspiracy-filled mail from listeners. Written in deft, compact paragraphs, Offill’s novel balances insight with humour and a timely, ambient sense of anxiety. In a time where death is at the forefront, it’s rare to find a book that so thoroughly reminds us about the joys of life, the fragments of memories that last a lifetime, rooting out what really matters. “Even though it’s got death in the title, it’s a book about life – it’s about living life,” says Godden. “It’s about telling people you love them before it’s too late. It’s not really about death, which death often isn’t. So much of this book is about facing your fear, and how empowering it is to see fear for what it is, to see doubt, and to find courage, to find hope. Mental health is such a strong component of Wolf’s story, and there are times where the narrative will have you questioning if what you’re reading is even real. There’s a part of the book where Wolf admits that they’re Bipolar, and there are a handful of moments where you begin to question if Mrs Death is even there or if it’s all part of Wolf’s mind, their worsening mental health; and this is even before their Bipolar is even brought up. Even by the end of the book it’s unclear if we’ve actually experienced a story of a troubled young person meeting the personification of Death, of if it’s simply the story of a troubled young person trying to find some sense of stability and happiness in their life.

The author’s depiction of Mrs Death is of a woman who enjoys an evening by the TV with Wolf, a glass of red wine in hand, rather than the traditional scythe. Dreary is simply not her style. The absurd is also employed as a safe space to explore uncomfortable truths about life (and death). The character of the Desk - more specifically Mrs. Death’s desk - communicates its disappointment at the cards it has been dealt by fate. Exploring death Let’s be real, we are all going to die, yet, this is something I don’t think we talk a lot about. Or if we do it is generally clouded in fear. Death is the only thing we have surety about yet, as the book says, we don’t call it by name when it happens. We say, “pass on, passed…” anything but death. Without death, there is no life, and I enjoyed how the author was able to position death as something we should think about, maybe not harp on but at least think about. I liked that it is a troubled young writer who had experiences with people dying that got to have a friendship with Death. That for me really gave the theme the depth it needed. The voice of the furniture allows for these same insights into the pain of living to be developed whilst maintaining the light tone which eases the discomfort of truth. Mrs Death Misses Death should not, however, be dismissed as simply a darkly humorous book. Godden’s observations on mourning are particularly potent as she derives meaning from the mundane, from the objects we choose to keep to the way we might be innocently ‘ordinary’ in our unawareness of how our worlds will irrevocably change. The tone of Mrs Death Misses Death is the equivalent of starting an essay with: ‘Good afternoon. My essay will cover the topic of X. In this essay, I will explore X, Y, and Z.’ …while also struggling to hit the required word count. It was somehow simultaneously convoluted and too on the nose.The effect is to produce a collage of speech and speechlessness, a story that sometimes slips away from you even while you are reading it, becoming a memento mori in form as well as content. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect when a poet writes a novel, and exactly the sort of thing you’ll devour if you like huge helpings of experimentation with your fiction. Caution: This book may cause an existential crisis, writes Béibhinn Breathnach of Salena Godden's debut novel... I felt the first 25% of the book was phenomenal, the writing, introduction of characters, scenes and Mrs. Death narration was flawless. Then, it all started to wane. Death in itself is a very board topic, it’s been happening since the beginning of time- there are so many ways to explore the topic and I think that’s where the author (maybe even the editor) may have went wrong, she tried to do entirely too much instead of keeping it tighter and more focused. At one point I was like, “huh, how dis even drop in yasso?!!” that for me was a little infuriating. The Writing It is clear Salena Godden can write. This is my first introduction to her work, and she writes solidly. I have never read any of her poetry so it was great seeing a bit of it included in this book. She writes convincingly so much so, I started feeling sorry for Mrs. Death. A chapter “Mrs Death: You Could be Heroes” starts with mourning the death of inspirational heroes like Cohen, Bowie and Prince before arguing that true heroes are activists, volunteers, protesters, health service workers, campaigners for “libraries, museums, galleries, independent bookshops … beautiful places where thinkers and writers and artists [can] meet and share work”

Death is literally in the title, so be fair warned that this isn’t always a nice and cozy story. There are discussions on real-life serial killers and their victims, which are graphic. They do not glamourize it but remind the reader that it happened. The author also discusses mental health, BLM, police brutality, and racism. Mrs. Death tells of her work, so we see death through a different lens. She’s not always crazy about the tragedy of death, the horror of death, the details of death. Godden writes of the tragedy and comedy of death. It’s a rumination on death. I mean, obviously YMMV and there will always be outliers, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that if you only read poetry irregularly and often find yourself being impatient with it when you do, and it’s mostly an exercise in frustration for you like it is for me, then you will probably feel pretty similarly to me regarding this book. I am upset about it, though, because the premise sounded so good, and the cover was so pretty. One approach Godden used to condense the text was to turn what originally she wrote as essays into shorter poems, such as 'Mrs Death in Holloway Prison' featuring Sarah Reed's story, giving the reader time to pause, and think and to "say her name." This is a broken prose poem which begins:

How many of these 100 Novels have you read?

I am here. Death is a woman. I am a woman. Surely by erasing me we have erased this power? By never portraying a woman as the representative of Death, the boss of Death, the figure of Death itself, one could debate that an important and fundamental disempowerment takes place. Perhaps this is what erasure looks like. Godden has created a meditation on the sheer amount of wasted life we are accustomed to accepting as part of the cost of living, the avoidable tragedies that are the byproduct of extractive capitalism. Just as resolutely as Godden writes about how death is inevitable, she underlines again and again that so many deaths are preventable and that these tragedies need not be repeated. Nut until we find another way to live, they will.