Florence Uniacke - A Bolt of Lightning Collapses Into the Letter’s Cadaver - Speeches of Mary

‘What kind of world would begin to crack open if the images of Mary / mère in this book were excised from the flesh? In Florence Uniacke’s A Bolt of Lightning Collapses Into the Letter’s Cadaver Speeches of Mary, a voice speaks: ‘I am all luck in this life’: a fierce yearning against & into the symbolic which, this book reminds us, still (and why wouldn’t that be the case?) captures us with enormous force. As child, to speak in the voice of the mother; and as Mary, to speak, instead of Paul, or Christ, or Luther, or the Father of the Father of the Father: because the speaking voices in this book make insistent acts of de-sanctification, acts with seek a different togetherness without knowing how that could be, these become not simply reversals which leave the symbolic intact, but pummellings which want an explosion of Paul’s fleshy tablets of the heart.’

- Helen Dimos

This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.