Alan Parry reviews Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022)

Merseyside-based writer, editor and lecturer Alan Parry was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022) over at The Broken Spine. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Parry writes:

Lydia Unsworth’s Residue is not here to tuck you in with neat resolutions or let you bask in warm nostalgia. This is a book that drags you through the wreckage of past homes, past selves, and forces you to confront what’s left behind. It’s restless. It’s jagged. It doesn’t give a fuck about linearity or easy sentimentality. Instead, it builds a geography of dislocation: places that don’t fit, memories that won’t sit still, identities that keep shifting under your feet.

It reads like a poetic fever dream, a history of homes unravelled in snapshots, from childhood to now. Each poem is tethered to a location, but don’t expect stable ground. These spaces are in flux, warped by time, distorted by memory. Think of it less like a roadmap and more like a ghost tour – each stop marked by what is caught in liminal spaces, what stains, what refuses to be scrubbed away.

Place as a Wound, Memory as the Scar
Unsworth knows that home is never just bricks and mortar. No, it’s a psychological battlefield! Manchester Road (formative years) puts you right in the thick of it, in a house ‘up against a long main road’ – where privacy is a joke and exposure is constant. There’s a hole – literal or metaphorical – ‘like a hole through the middle of me’, an image so blunt it leaves a bruise. This is what Residue does best: it turns domestic space into something unstable, something that betrays and consumes.

Then there’s Castle Irwell (a messy escape), which captures the chaos of shared living, where bodies blur into each other and solitude is a luxury. ‘Eleven is a team but what I needed was confessional.’ That line alone is a gut punch. Because what’s lonelier than being surrounded by people and still feeling like a ghost?

The Poetry of Fragmentation: Syntax as Architecture
Unsworth doesn’t write neat, tidy verse. Her poetry is fractured, staccato, broken (like our spines) in all the right places. It mirrors the instability of memory, how it skips, erases, distorts. In Brook Drive (including the day that cherry tree was planted), she captures the fluidity of perception in clipped, surreal bursts:

‘spaces are ill-defined / corners become whatever you like / a scurry of ants in a decked-out butter tub.’

Objects lose their meaning. Boundaries shift. Reality is whatever your mind decides it is. And the form of the poem reflects that, refusing to sit still, refusing to behave.

Then there’s Furnesses (tiny fires), where short, rapid-fire lines create a breathless momentum. ‘A ceiling high above a hide of eyes / settle into complete knot of two and hi-fi.’ It’s claustrophobic, relentless, like trying to get comfortable in a room that keeps shrinking around you.

The Emotional Aftershock: What Residue Leaves Behind
The real power of Residue is how it lingers. These poems aren’t just recollections. They haunt! Riverbank (it ended badly) takes something as mundane as a pigeon and turns it into an omen:

‘a pigeon billows through the curtains / disorder of cloth and stifled wing.’

The weight of absence, the ache of something lost, it’s all there, stripped bare. And then it hits you with: ‘only so much can be held / only so much can be held in.’ That’s the punchline of life, right? We try to hold onto places, people, versions of ourselves, but in the end, most of it slips through.

Heald Place (I begin to show my age) lays it out in brutal clarity. The walls of the house are ‘smashed to bits on a Saturday night by drunken younghards.’ Decay isn’t poetic here. It’s inevitable, ugly, and unceremonious. The past doesn’t crumble beautifully. Rather it gets kicked in, pissed on, and left behind.

Final Verdict: Read This Before You Move Again
Without doubt, Lydia Unsworth has written something that refuses to settle. Residue is what happens when you put a stethoscope to the walls of every place you’ve ever lived and listen to what’s still breathing inside. It’s fragmented, disorienting, sometimes even messy. Here’s the kicker, that’s the point! Memory isn’t a straight line. Neither is belonging.

So, if you like your poetry neat and polished, this might not be for you. But if you want something raw, something that gets under your skin, something that reminds you what it feels like to stand in the doorway of an old home and realise you don’t quite fit there anymore… this is it!.

Unsworth doesn’t just write about places. She writes about what places do to us. And Residue makes damn sure you don’t forget it.

some author activity: Birchard, Earl, Norris, Armantrout + Pittella,

Guy Birchard's work is discussed by Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald, over at her recently-launched substack, where she also discussed Amanda Earl's work and Ken Norris' work; the full text of "Poetry Meets Physics: Poet Rae Armantrout Reading and in Conversation with Physicist Ben Buchler. Street Theatre, Canberra, Thursday 19 September 2024" is online as a pdf; the first four poems from Pittella's above/ground press chapbook have been translated into Italian by Gianluca Rizzo and published online at rossocorpolingua: and Pittella also has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series.