We Are Made of Diamond Stuff

I have read Isabel Waidner's We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff, my first lyric prose in a while. It's funny how the brain needs a moment to re-adapt to it. Telling itself, 'calm down, you don't have to make sense of every word here, words and meanings do things a bit differently here, don't be so literal!' Prose lyric can show you how to accept ambivalences. We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff has got both legs (or it might even have more legs) on the ground: Two queer youth hanging/working at a shabby hotel in a small UK coastal town, queers clashing with UKIP protestors (who also have gays amongst them, anti-immigration sentiments unite, yay) and deals with working class hopelessness in a region that had bet on tourism and lost almost everything. Reeboks are not just working class shoes but also come alive as animals. Blake's tyger tyger growls softly in the back, instead of rainbow colours the queers paint a hotel lobby grey to hunt down a lypard. Waidner draws on aspects from their own life, like the problems of getting UK citizenship even after living and working there for years (working for too little money to be considered worthy) and shakes it up with a bit of magic realism and a sense for the poetic. Waidner conjures up figures she can identify with, other misfits, Eleven from Stranger Things, or Tonya Harding: no matter how good an ice-skater, she was ever not-fragile-womanly-pretty enough, and had her working class background, the dirt under the cultural fingernails showing through, keeping her small. Waidner also has a thing for wordplay that's a bit cringy but sweet, like "purring rain", a bit like dad jokes, which doesn't make her writing any less daring though, but instead adds to it's layers, makes for more to explore.
You can find the whole blog post here: evemassacre.de/blog/2023/04/21/diamond-stuff-star-stuff/