Half-Life

Author: Eleanor Tennyson

Publisher: If a Leaf Falls (2025)

Eleanor Tennyson’s Half-Life is a book of diminished lyrics – porous, sensitized, title-less, they speak quietly, as they are sensible enough to ‘fear chronology’; they experience memories as debt because their future has been mortgaged. Figures recur like intrusive thoughts: Anna Karenina, horse races, a dead person’s Xbox – and a thin, continuous note sounds throughout, like an alarm – hatred of the rich, death drive, an unshakeable suspicion of the bogus. It keeps the poems in touch with the real mystery. In fact, it won’t leave them alone.