Snagged on red thread

Snagged on red thread is a long poem of protest, power and complicity. Jazmine Linklater articulates how the apparatus of Empire is encoded in the structures we live in: militarised sights set on schoolyards, bargaining arms deals with teenagers, surveilling civic squares, co-opting institutions. And yet Snagged on red thread is compelled to march, to embroider, to bear witness.

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‘What is it to only know the word sweetheart in the language of people being killed in your name? How do we comprehend the paltriness of our gestures against genocide? The speaker of Jazmine Linklater’s Snagged on red thread moves within the intimacies of complicity, not excluding themselves from the we whose taxes fund genocide, or succumbing to individualising games of guilt or absolution. The poem rather weaves then with now – how the “war on terror” normalised the murder of Arabs in the “Western” imaginary for generations. It snags constantly on irresolution, not attempting to tie anything up, but always manages to locate the right enemy.’

– Mira Mattar

‘Snagged on red thread is committed to the act of witnessing, and to witnessing the act of witnessing: “Am I giving the looking / the room demands right?” Linklater tries on, then discards, different ways of looking, none of which are adequate to the horrors the poem describes. In this way it displays an exemplary impatience, with itself, and with those responsible for suffering. How else do you carry on living day-to-day right now? This distraught, tender, vigilant poem responds with answers only too large or too small, and as such it strikes me as truthful: “Try to think geopolitically,” it tells itself, “scoop the ladybird up / with a flyer.”’

– Oli Hazzard