My Baby Shot Me Down (2014) Richard Penny (ed), Ruth Starling (ed) and Rachel Smart (ed).

I’ve spent a lot of time with these babies. All of the women writers who are featured - and there are ten of them here - have been story or poem of the week on ABCtales a couple of times.  There are other women writers that are not featured. It’s a difficult one. We’ve all got our own preferences, whether it’s prose or poetry. Maggy van Eijk, for example, is a strange beast.  ‘This is the part where a Dutch girl/ loses herself in smoke only/to find herself again in the/ letterbox eyes of an Iranian’. I could talk about sound or imagery or metaphor or even sensation and the rhetoric of her poetry, but the truth is I don’t know jackshit, but I know I like it. If Maggy publishes a poem on ABCtales it’s an automatic pick for poem of the week. Rachel Smart and Ruth Starling are more recent additions to ABC. Both have won story of the week and poem of the week. Bastards. How we hate people that can do something we can’t. It’s like being able to write with both hands. It shouldn’t be allowed. I admire the opening to Alison Wassell’s ‘Ashes’ and wish I’d wrote it myself. ‘She is dry-eyed at the funeral. Later, at the wake, she passes round plates of sandwiches…’. There are two writers whose best work is not included in this short book. Claudine Lazar’s ‘1974’ and I also think she wrote a prequel ‘1972’ were stunning pieces of memoir and should have led to a full sized book. ‘Las Vegas’ hints at the kind of pared down honest writing that jumps off the page makes me ache for more.  Similarly, Katherine Blacks’ story ‘The Great Escape’ is a diary entry. You couldn’t make it up, or at least I couldn’t. She lived it. Mesmerising as the eyes of a snake. She’d know which one. Those ABCtaler’s that didn’t make the book list, don’t worry about it. Write something wonderful.