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

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Sustaining conversations with heroic self-pity, Key delivers a hilarious portrait of an artist just about creatively keeping his funk at bay – at least until his favourite boozer can reopen. 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. A collection of poems and conversations from inside the author's flat during England's first lockdown.

He Used Thought as a Wife by Tim Key | Waterstones He Used Thought as a Wife by Tim Key | Waterstones

Tim Key is a British poet and comedian, and this book is a fat collection of poems and conversations. Reading this, as the world finally seems to be easing a bit (maybe--I see you, Delta variant), served as the perfect ellipses to the odd, overwhelming, indescribable experience of 2020(1). He’s on that pedestal you put certain artists in your teens where they’re simply untouchable to you for that very reason. But suffice to say, if you lived through lockdown you will be able to relate to it, and if you have any sense of humour you will laugh at it.But what at first seems like just a collection of stand-alone snippets of text manages to create a quietly effective, cohesive whole. I take it with me from the living room to the bedroom and vice versa, also if I don’t plan on reading in it.

He Used Thought as a Wife: An Anthology of Poems

A lot of the dialogue is written exactly how Tim Key speaks and there are plenty of laugh out loud sentences. The mixture of two-page microplays ('conversations') taking place over Zoom or on the phone, plus Key's signature poems, are all consistently hilarious. What stands out about this book is the conversations, beautifully type-faced, between Key and various friends and family members he keeps in touch with from a safe distance.Most of the book is dialogues and poems where you don’t know what is real and what is not, which is also apt when remembering living alone talking to yourself for weeks on end. This was a recommendation from a tv programme and I thought it would be good to have a bit of humour amidst the crime I usually read. Living alone, he teeters on the precipice of a breakdown, though he remains steadfastly in denial about his abject loneliness and the effect enforced solitude has had on his creative output, every good intention upended by distractions such as Come Dine With Me on the telly or craft IPAs in the fridge.

He Used Thought as a Wife, by Tim Key, review: pithily funny

Alone in this intersection of spoken waffle and poetry, there’s nothing else like Tim’s writing and it’s in top form here. Key's utilising surreal humour to guide us into a refracted hall of shattered mirrors throughout this, which oddly feels entirely and exclusively like everything did during the strange cultural standstill we all found ourselves in. Concerning, as this is the most accurately lonely account of lockdown ‘faeces’, and it’s clear at the top. Juniper designed the beautiful Megadate printed script, and then his playing cards (which also have conversations with her on some of them) and in this book her role as TK's foil is thrust even further into the spotlight (although how much (if any) of it is real is for the reader to guess). I'm giving it one star for the concept which was brilliant however it just felt like a nasty rant most of the time.It's semi-autobiographical meaning it's not entirely clear what he's invented with his own imagination (I mean, did he have a cow on his balcony? The dialogue is punchy, and contentious, and the mundanity and psychedelic fantasy coil together to create a historical text that's going to have Pepys absolutely on his heels. Well done Tim for making the most of a Class A shitty situation and producing a book that will completely stand the test of time. In the meantime, I listened to music, I thought about all the books that I had read and above all, I felt like it was an act of resistance.

He Used Thought as a Wife by Tim Key | Waterstones

Key’s decline is charted with a dry and ever-present wit, which frequently erupts into a bluntly funny line that elicits a hard, inappropriate laugh. Anyone familiar with Key’s passive-aggressive but vulnerable, needy, beer-swigging onstage persona will doubtless be able to conjure a picture of the poet-comic gone to seed. His admittedly unreliable recollections are a delight, despite, or possibly because of, the undertow of despair that he’s trying not to confront.Poems about men getting stuck in webs, poems about the ancient city of Canterbury, poems about canoodling with a rose. but I feel like this just highlights the chaos of the pandemic and the stuff we all had to do to cope. Just as the pattern becomes predictable the book takes an interesting meta-turn that is enjoyable, and self aware. The jaunty bonhomie of his blokey middle-aged banter which he so accurately nails is tissue-thin, a passive-aggressive frustration scratching through every superficially jovial turn-of phrase. If you are in Australia or New Zealand (DVD Region 4), note that almost all DVDs distributed in the UK by the BBC and 2entertain are encoded for both Region 2 and Region 4.