He Used Thought as a Wife: An Anthology of Poems & Conversations (From Inside)

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When observed under this strange beautifully printed microscope we see we all had a piercing loneliness that can now feel all but forgotten. Key’s comedy is up my street but even if you’re not a fan, you will find something charming in remembering the angst we all had for that first 12 weeks. Perhaps now that the memory is fading, this is a strange form of nostalgia for a time when we worried about keeping the nhs going rather than how to pay our gas bills? Instead, He Used Thought As A Wife is primarily a compelling character study of his peevish poet persona at his most irritable, condescending and insecure.

He Used Thought as a Wife: An Anthology of Poems - AbeBooks

A prolific sod, he’s selected ninety of his trademark vignettes and packed them off to Emily Juniper for her to fling onto pages and shape into a book. A collection of poems and conversations from inside the author's flat during England's first lockdown. But what at first seems like just a collection of stand-alone snippets of text manages to create a quietly effective, cohesive whole. Concerning, as this is the most accurately lonely account of lockdown ‘faeces’, and it’s clear at the top. Thank you so much for all your kind words - The author put it very well when he said of the book "it kind of has a life of it's own now.I appreciate that the conversations were partially supposed to be banal, to reflect what lockdown was like, but I think they were the wrong kind of banal - a wearying rather than clever kind) After reading the conversations, one can't help but wonder why they remain his friends as he seems to take no genuine interest in any of them, mocks their attempts to care for him, and insults them at every turn. Very meta, all this description of mindlessly twirling his orange pen or dialogues with the long-suffering Juniper about the erratic supply of content for this title and how it should all be laid out. Despite alighting on obvious touchstones such as the NHS clapping, Johnson’s brush with Covid, banana bread and Dominic “Cumdawg” Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle, it is the specific oddity of Key’s existence that best captures the general experience of lonely, inward-looking, disconnected life. Alone in this intersection of spoken waffle and poetry, there’s nothing else like Tim’s writing and it’s in top form here. The whole thing is conducted like Key's leaning across the table to you in the pub, relaying all the lurid details.

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Interspersed, the more drawn-out conversational transcripts are subtler in their humour, yet convey sudden, stabbing despair. At some point, he hit upon the wheeze of transferring these poems and conversations into a book, badgering his long-suffering collaborator Emily Juniper into designing it (beautifully). Key's twisting of the truth, while blatant and outrageous, is the perfect way to depict the sickly, unsteady, claustrophobic feeling of the first lockdown. Discussions ensued about what, if anything, the point of it all was, and a healthy debate as to whether it should be broken up into chapters and, if so, why. Just as the pattern becomes predictable the book takes an interesting meta-turn that is enjoyable, and self aware.

The mixture of two-page microplays ('conversations') taking place over Zoom or on the phone, plus Key's signature poems, are all consistently hilarious.