Cache-Cache by Sarah-Clare Conlon

Description

Sarah-Clare Conlon is an editor and copywriter based in Manchester, where she is Victoria Baths’ inaugural Writer-in-Residence. She studied French and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, and is a Manchester Open 2022 artist. Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and a Salt Prizes winner, her prose and poetry has appeared in anthologies from Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Dunlin Press and Speculative Books, and journals including Lighthouse, PN Review, Poetry Scotland and Stand. In 2022, Sarah-Clare is a contributor to the Lancashire Stories project and resident writer on board the Small Bells Ring Research Vessel Furor Scribendi, and she publishes three books.

Sarah-Clare Conlon’s cache-cache (hide and seek) plays with the beautiful collision of the generative constraints of OULIPO with the domestic constraints of pandemic lockdowns. Conlon’s distinct observational style is given a new spin as these crisp, incisive texts delve deeply into the infrathin of the everyday, finding ‘Comfort in the familiar […] / Inspiration in routine’. Pensées amicales, indeed!

Scott Thurston, Phrases Towards A Kinepoetics (Contraband Books)

“Question your teaspoons” Georges Perec said. Apart from explaining why it took him so long to eat a chocolate mousse, Perec’s enjoinder reminds us that, when it comes to inspiration, everything we need is already here, if we look closely enough. Sarah-Clare Conlon does just that in cache-cache, filtering the particles and particularities of the quotidian through shimmering prisms of Oulipian constraint to find mystery and meaning. Stylish and sharply observed, these pieces are also funny and melancholy, speaking to us of lockdown, confinement and the elasticity of time, as well as hats, dogs, haircuts, camellias and all the things from which a world is made. Those teaspoons really do have the answers, if you ask them nicely.

Tom Jenks, rhubarb (Beir Bua Press)

The day they added a full stop to our lives, a comma butterfly nested in my hair and the sky was as blue and crowdless as the 1970s. So opens Conlon’s charming response to the collision of the world with 2020. Between two languages, and in a fog that glitters with the rain, there’s a magical sort of survival at work here. Make a rule, let it take you to another world; observe, escape. Even the collection’s title, cache-cache, like a child with a ball – the world will be fun, the rising sadness will be transformed into a game. There’s a heartbreaking serendipity to be found within Conlon’s constructs.

Lydia Unsworth, Mortar (Osmosis Press)