CW: discussion of rape
The girls in the red house are singing is the latest poetic offering from Dr. Tracey Slaughter. The collection is split into four distinct sequences with separate narrative examinations of painful human experiences. While each is clearly defined and could exist strongly on its own, the four feel to be a part of the same punk-tinged world. These sequences deal with grief, pain and coping with it, rape, and the pandemic, all told with grit and an occasional sense of humour.
The opening sequence, ‘opioid sonatas’, which won Slaughter the £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize in 2023 chronicles the experience of surviving a vehicular crash and the trauma of readjusting to life after. It acts as a memory of a friend lost in the accident and a tribute to flesh stitched back together. In ‘dressings’ the speaker comments “Blood lasted days on the back of his voice. The nurse held up a white branch that was not mine,” signalling the moment a cast was cut from her arm. She heals but the crash and the grief never leave her, asking you to witness it while glam rock plays overhead. It is a rewarding experience to go into an art piece knowing it has been awarded highly, and immediately understanding why. These poems are urgent in the wake of fraughtness and as harrowing as they are beautiful.
In ‘psychopathology of the small hotel’ the speaker navigates the reader through an adulterous hotel full of people trying to forget. These poems are slow and sexy yet desperate, longing to be loved or used. It speaks of long, dark nights that spill far beyond the confines of the next morning, as seen in the titular poem of this sequence: “The windows are stains / where there used to be sun.” The poems feel dirty, sexy, and honest. Checking into this hotel could sound like fun at first, but there is more than just pleasure within. Mistakes are made as a form of coping or dealing with pain, as seen in the same poem: “I let the wrong person / into my body. But when did the cunt ever want daily bread?”
The titular sequence is perhaps the hardest to read, due to the subject matter of revealing and processing a rape from the past, as well as confronting the history of the culture that surrounds it. The subject is handled deftly, but it is aimed to confront the reader with the harsh reality that roughly one in every three women experiences. Never does the speaker diminish her experience for the reader, simply recounting the assault and lack of support and understanding she received after. In ‘teeth’ she highlights the before and after of the event, retelling: “I remember kissing. Then I remember gravel.” This painful juxtaposition is one of the least direct allusions in the moving sequence.
In the shortest sequence, ‘nudes, animals & ruins’, the speaker recounts the most universal experience highlighted in the collection—living through the COVID-19 pandemic. She meanders through the streets while pondering the human condition. She comments: “People still meet to trade drugs by the skip – how our addictions tower / at times like this.” It highlights a common theme throughout the whole collection: survival, no matter what. We see the imagery of a world on pause while humanity continues because it has to. The sequence feels like a gentle summary and conclusion of the collection as a whole.
These poems come from a place of living fully, with as much gusto and determination as one can muster. The speaker urges you to wake up and do the damn thing, to pick yourself up and keep going. They are fast and hungry, sad and open. This is a collection easy to read in one sitting, easier still to want to read again. What an honour to read a writer at her best.
