VF PRESS

THE POOR CHILDREN

The Poor Children is 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.

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"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. Slack, however, refuses any linearity, trying to create a style that sits between a stream-of-consciousness novel and a set of aphorisms. 

...one of the style’s biggest strengths is how it allows Slack to shift from observations about the minutiae of everyday life to sweeping philosophical or political insights in a moment, almost without the reader noticing. 

...Slack’s openness throughout this ‘memory project’ makes “The Poor Children” 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, Schirn Magazine August 2021

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August 2021 review from Juliet Jacques in Schirn Magazine

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“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

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"Also a great admiration for the ways in which (they) remade a language somehow, out of the ruins or on the margins of something"

Jesse Darling

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“Order this book!” 

Ariana Reines

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"I found it truly moving, eloquent, insightful, on almost every aspect of Love."

Lynne Segal

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"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

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"Their writing style is absolutely captivating and inspiring me to read more and to keep on reading. it's delectable and unique. i enjoy a lot and it reminds me of the joy that is reading. a proof of that is simply the fact that from the get go, i'm not sure that i would have read something about this subject matter. They have a very clear working class critique that isn't done in an expected or matter of fact sort of a way. i appreciate it a lot. thank you for doing this."

Liad Hussein Kantorowicz

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"such a singular and brilliant mind"

Dr Kate Hardy, University of Leeds

"like being in an empty funfair, underwater, upside-down.  I am lost and found and touched."

Amy Durden

"There's something - not shamanic, exactly? But that kind of polyvocality; not Bahktinian carnival, not exactly Harawayan heteroglossia; not a chorus, but maybe something more like a crowd, not gathered in protest necessarily, but gathered with a congruence of purpose - in the "I" in The Poor Children"

Sam Cha, author of The Yellow Book

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“I reread (their) book today, in the gloomy weather, the rain.  It grows, expands in a haunting, resonant way.  It is a surprise, a burden and a joy.”

Sharon Kivland 

“I find it so unique and it resonates in ways I can’t explain.  I find myself wanting to create more evocative dreamscape narratives on the days I read a few pages”

Tammy Ruggiero

“Good”

Sophie Collins, author of Small White Monkeys, and who included it in her Books of the Year in The White Review Books of 2022

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“I cannot express how much these books entranced me. It’s been a long time since I read something that gave me this almost telepathic
feeling of a kind of language which is close to how the world often feels to me, and is what I want writing to do somehow or make space for, and there is such shimmery abundance of memory work which is so vital and sets off all these associations. I was raised in a single parent family and there were so many moments of recognition and bittersweetness I found so so moving in The Shedding and The Poor Children especially. But also just the way your narrator or speaker’s attention moves associatively between things and the almost musical
weaving of detail. There is so much more to say (maybe one day I will find a way to write about your writing)!”

Maria Sledmere (on The Poor Children and The Shedding)

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"I'm so glad I've found their writing.  The voice is so clear and strong with this extraordinary shifting balance between dispassion and full, knowing presence.  A sense of living in and out of time and I'm captivated (the cat in the linen cupboard!). One of my favourite novels is Wide Sargasso Sea and there's something of the swirling overwhelmng nature of expectation versus being that feels familiar to Jean's perspective.  I want more!"

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Linsey Young, curator at Tate Britain and of Women in Revolt