Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's "A Touch of Evil" "What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement "to be" a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person--including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics--need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve.
Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered--as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective--it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity.
This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language.

A moving meditation on grief and motherhood by one of Britain's most celebrated poets.

The British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today. With her striking musical gifts, she is as happy in traditional forms as experimental, and though her poetry has a kinship to that of the New York School, at heart she is unaligned with any tribe. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as a poet, Riley has produced a body of work that is both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open.

This book, her first collection of poems to appear with an American press, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed recent volume Say Something Back, a lyric meditation on bereavement composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worse circumstances.” Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, returns to the subject of grief, just as grief returns in memory to be continually relived.

A brilliant outing from one of the finest poets currently working in the English language. This is at once a sharply political and deeply personal book which explores just that intersection. 'Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking' Guardian

Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's "A Touch of Evil" "What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement "to be" a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person--including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics--need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve.
Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered--as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective--it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity.
This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language.

For the last twenty-five years, "Language, Discourse, Society" has been the most intellectually challenging series in English. Its titles range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This anniversary reader brings together a fascinating group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship over the past two decades.

For the last twenty-five years, "Language, Discourse, Society" has been the most intellectually challenging series in English. Its titles range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This anniversary reader brings together a fascinating group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship over the past two decades.

For this collection, a number of contemporary poets, distinguished by their energy and thoughtfulness, were asked to write on aspects of the working processes of poetry in whatever ways they believed would be helpful to readers. The result is an invaluable account of their reflections on writing and its conditions, on their enthusiasms, and on their sense of the directions of others' poetry as well as of their own. Some poems, preoccupied by the questions of this book, are included. A scarcely-documented history of sustained work in Britain, non-parochial and outside a restricted "mainstream" is illuminated in these essays; many of the contributors here are or have been small-press publishers and journal editors too. This engaging book will serve as an introduction to the work of some fine writers, as it debates questions of significance for readers and writers of contemporary poetry.

An attempt to explore the idea that there are historical sedimentations of people into gendered categories, including the asymmetrical distances of both "women" and "men" from changing ideas of the human; the increasing saturation, from the late seventeenth century, of women with their sex; and the nineteenth century elisions between "the social" and "women". It is argued that feminism cannot but play out the inescapable indeterminacy of "women" whether consciously or not, and that this is made plain in its oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference.;The author maintains that a full recognition of the ambiguity of the category of "women" is not a semantic doubt, but a condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

An attempt to explore the idea that there are historical sedimentations of people into gendered categories, including the asymmetrical distances of both "women" and "men" from changing ideas of the human; the increasing saturation, from the late seventeenth century, of women with their sex; and the nineteenth century elisions between "the social" and "women". It is argued that feminism cannot but play out the inescapable indeterminacy of "women" whether consciously or not, and that this is made plain in its oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference.;The author maintains that a full recognition of the ambiguity of the category of "women" is not a semantic doubt, but a condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

Denise Riley has pursued her singular path with a determined disregard for poetic fashion: a poet of immense musical gifts and formal skill, as happy in traditional forms as experimental, her non-alignment with any ‘tribe’ has led to a rich and various poetry that, while densely allusive and intellectually uncompromising, remains emotionally open towards the reader at the most profound level. Say Something Back, her lyric meditation on bereavement, won Riley universal acclaim – and a wide and long-deserved readership. Her Selected Poems offers a generous overview of a working life which has taken in philosophy, feminism, literary history, song and aphorism – and within which the old certainties are interrogated and shaken at every turn. Hers is a voice through which we come to better understand one another, the meaning of our time here, and the nature of human communication itself.

‘Wide-ranging, sometimes anguished, her poems are fascinating and often beautiful, and certainly more than usually thought-provoking.’ - Guardian

Say Something Back will allow readers to see just why the name of Denise Riley has been held in such high regard by her fellow poets for so long. The book reproduces A Part Song, a profoundly moving document of grieving and loss, and one of the most widely admired long poems of recent years. Elsewhere these poems become a space for contemplation of the natural world and of physical law, and for the deep consideration of what it is to invoke those who are absent. But finally, they extend our sense of what the act of human speech can mean - and especially what is drawn forth from us when we address our dead. Lyric, intimate, acidly witty, unflinchingly brave, Say Something Back is a deeply moving book by one of our finest poets, and one destined to introduce Riley's name to a wide new readership.

Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life's absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you're lying when you aren't. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.

Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In "Impersonal Passion," she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal.

In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life's absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you're lying when you aren't. "Impersonal Passion" reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.

A new edition of a classic work on the history of feminism. Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "women" in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social. Feminist movements, Riley argues, have had no choice but to play out this indeterminacy of women. This is made plain in their oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. To fully recognize the ambiguity of the category of "women" is, she contends, a necessary condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.