(Left) Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland; (right) Ventricle, oil-on-canvas by Maria Sledmere.
In Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland, shades of indigo and lilac leak through the pages like milk, in variant continuums of strangeness and shame. There is, however, a kind of “tint” to these poems that evokes not quite the Kristevan abjection of skin on milk, but something more like the translucent surface of a jelly left to slowly rot.
Everything about you’s a bit like me — in the same way that North Carolina’s a bit like Ribena but rhymes with Vagina, which is nearly the same, but much darker — brutal and sweet like disease, sweet as an asphalt dealer. — Selima Hill, A Little Book of Meat[1]
