Use the Words You Have by Kimberly Campanello review

Kimberly Campanello’s work has always been uniquely difficult to define. Her most significant work, MOTHERBABYHOME , was a 796-page “poetry object” that took the form of a report on Ireland’s infamous Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, where up to 800 children had died between the 1920s and 1960s.

There are only six copies of the original edition, each poem printed on vellum and stored in an oak box. Hence, the term “poetry object”. Her practice moves fluidly between poetry , visual art, durational performance and digital literature, defying any easy categorisation. Knowing this, it feels uniquely perverse that Campanello’s latest project, Use the Words You Have , comes to us in the form of a novel.

Campanello brings many of her poetic sensibilities with her in her transitio