I have been thinking about unmothering of late… as a slow process of just letting your daughter be in the path she chooses to tread. But being made redundant is hard; what happens to my identity as mother when my child no longer wants to be mothered?… I watched The Eternal Daughter and some of the issues it explores made me think of the mother-daughter relationship in quite a different way. What happens when you foreground the daughter and not the mother? What happens when the ‘you’ as ‘mother’ is not self-indulgently centre stage….

American Fiction is screening at the DCA until the 22 February. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 satirical novel, Erasure, it follows Thelonious "Monk" Ellison at a crisis point in his life. Ellison is a published African American novelist who is critically but not commercially successful. He writes literary and esoteric novels such as a retelling of the story of Euripides, and a parody of the work of French Post-Structuralists. His agent tells him that he needs instead to write a ‘black’ book to which he replies in exasperation, ‘I am black, and this is my book!’

I’ve come out of the DCA cinema today puzzled and frustrated. The Zone of Interest, a film about the Höss family living next to Auschwitz, is perhaps the least pleasurable of the screenings I’ve been to of late, even as it has also seemed the most necessary. Representations of the Holocaust have to surmount the sometimes insurmountable: how to represent a historical event that seems unimaginable, unbearable and incomprehensible in its horror and magnitude, a primal wounding as it were to our understanding of what it means to be human.

All of Us Strangers started its screen run at the local cinema, DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts), 26 January. I had been waiting for this film to appear at the local cinema for some time now….I was curious about how a film about grief, familial relationships, intimacy, and desire handles those issues through its central conceit taken from Tachi Yamada’s novel, Strangers. I went with my friend, Ruth Morrison.

I’ll have to pull back my instincts, my desire to allow myself only to feel this work, not to feel I have to know it and show how I know. Because isn’t that what a book review is all about? A professionalised description of contents and effects, identifying themes, motives… Yet, as Louise Glück writes, ‘Within the discipline of criticism, nothing is more difficult than praise. To speak of what you love… to speak of such work is difficult because the natural correlatives of awe and reverence are not verbal.’ …

Carl Phillips has written of art that it is motivated by a ‘restlessness of the imagination’, not as ‘adversary but as opportunity, not as an object of fear but, for better or worse, an object of an all-but-impossible-to resist fascination.’ In this essay, Gail Low reflects on her own encounter with Chimera , an exhibition of new and existing work by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer at the Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee.

Anne Casey’s third poetry collection is a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of deeply personal grief that yet, somehow, leans always a little towards the light. Touching the poet’s own experiences of mothering young boys in the face of wide-spread environmental crisis, on the turmoil and isolation of Covid-19, and on losing her parents, the light we cannot see is one of those rare collections that uses language as a prism through which you, I, we, see the living world anew.