Elliot C. Mason

For an English poet who lives and works in England, Rachael Allen’s poetry feels uncannily exilic. Her writing removes itself from its own voice, standing aside and pointing us towards the wounded, silent body where violence accumulates. Before the opening section, Allen’s latest collection, God Complex, begins with this peculiar removal:
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I look out
through stained glass
pressing my neck
for religious lumps.
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This restrained voice is growing prophetic signs. Her own body is not the flesh and blood she lives through, but rather an accumulation of possible futures and their paralysis in abusive, ungrievable pasts:
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Here is a wasteland
of past aesthetics
patched up with modern tubes,
a church. Perhaps
I have a deity in me –
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The narrative of Allen’s first collection, Kingdomland (Faber & Faber, 2019), follows the obscure death of a woman who, if any clear information is retrievable about her in the poems, worked as a cleaner, either professionally or domestically. The speaker is a confounded onlooker of the violence that ends the woman’s life. Not so much her death, but rather the lingering, heavy presence of the absence of her life is described as a landscape from which the speaker cannot remove herself. There is no agency in the speaker, and no ultimate redemption is offered.

The closing section of Kingdomland is a marvellous, profoundly ambivalent manifesto on the collective form of grief, in that loss brings the living together. God Complex assumes the same emotional ambivalence, between heavy misery and the optimistic gathering of loss, but in the context of a romantic relationship.

The opposite gendering of this loss, from a woman dying in Kingdomland to a man leaving in God Complex, redetermines the poetic landscape. Here, bodies are fundamentally separated, pulled apart into incompatible worlds. The explicitly feminised speaker is under acute surveillance in every social context:
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In company, I’d watch myself perform as though televised.

[…]

I will be believed one day, if not for this performance,
then perhaps my next.

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The demands of the male observer are hidden, his words never breaking through from the silent ubiquity of their god complex. But his judgment is always present: “Yes, I too / for the life of me cannot remember what we talked about”, the speaker admits, confessing to an accusation that was never explicitly made. The abyss that grows between the speaker and her partner is in some sense the process of gendering itself. The man is determined as a man by the performance of his independence and his freedom from the demand to confess. He admits nothing. He never even bothers speaking.

The feminised speaker, meanwhile, constantly punishes herself for her confirmation of what she is accused of. A classic Freudian hysteric, she is told she is hysterical, the reaction to which is precisely the symptoms of hysteria: paranoia, acute anxiety, hallucinations, fantasies of universal betrayal, writing poetry…
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God damn an ex-wife! God damn a new wife! I am the
equidistant route from one to the other, a tree-slut, wearing
my wig and sat like a crab in the wayward ditch, a signpost.

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Her own ritual poeticisation of her pain is a confirmation of the paranoia: was all the pain made just so it could become poetry? The god complex of a silent and distant man gives rise to these painful, gothic prayers of loss, but ultimately, “the god is me”. The abyssal absence of the speaker’s world is ideological at its core:

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I have been forced-fed lack
like a goose too thick in life for its wrecked liver,
made too large for its future consumption.

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Her loss, now, is personal and private. Loss is the process of privatising her body, separating it from the social.
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In God Complex, Kingdomland’s social practice of mourning has been removed. What is left is personal stasis. In solitary blocks of mostly prose poetry, the speaker is now displaced from the communal sharing of grief. This time, it is she herself who is lost. Her own presence is absent. Even in the most dramatic moments—reminiscing on a childhood exposed to brutal domestic abuse—the speaker cannot encounter herself as an “I”, as a subject in the scene:
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How to have sat, as a child,
at a murderer’s feet and not been murdered?
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There is no subject here, no speaking voice, and again there is a causality between enforced and experienced absence. Having been subjected to the brutal erasure of love and care, she experiences herself as a non-presence. Asking “How to have sat” rather than “How did I sit”, she exposes her “syntax sown with apology”.

The joy of Allen’s writing is her ability to animate the most quotidian moments of hidden violence with vibrant intensity. The direct materiality of these intense moments gives them a political force, even if nothing political is explicitly formulated. The section “how to eat a lotus” begins with a paragraph of prose: “In living I wanted to disrupt the history of women’s stories in / my life, but it turned out I couldn’t. History is a sequence of / repeating patterns so extreme they are inescapable”. In the following pages, irregular verse sections flow uneasily between self-blame, physical wounding, romance, and very materialist contemporary politics.
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The intention of suffering
a lived punishment I felt I deserved

…

I want to switch back the blood.

…

A bird gags sweetly on the new green deal
as I work my way through ineffable instructions

on how to live this poor and shabby life
as performance. How to pack it, sell it?
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These lines exemplify Allen’s poetic powers: the political is not experienced as a general and unified demand. Instead, it is carried through each minor instance of love and pain, of care and brutality. The nature that certain politicians at least feign some form of care for is chocking on the failure of politics, sweetly gagging on Green New Deals, while the speaker, in the totalising confusion of her own struggle with violence and loss, is trying to put a shine on her suffering. I cannot help but wonder if this book itself is the packed and sold form of Allen’s own sweet gagging sounds.

But then, suddenly, a single couplet of prose throws everything off track: “Sometimes I feel the edges of my teeth bleed and taste / metal in my mouth, like a big iron dick”. The line is choking—a massive, monstrous line that blocks the throat. All politics is concentrated into a big dick, without the slightest trace of burlesque or buffoonery.

One of the most striking poetic features of Kingdomland is its description of intensely material and domestic scenes through language that feels mystical, mystifying, and, at times, literally lost in mist. In God Complex, this disjunction of setting and style is taken even further. The sudden intrusion of an iron dick is the most obvious example, but the clash of images occurs everywhere.

Often, this clash is performed as the arrival of politics in the personal. Most of the narrative is domestic and local, describing a breakup in a large house that the protagonist couple rents from an aristocratic friend. The river that passes by the house floods often, and the speaker sits alone with her drenched possessions, blaming herself for her loss.

Her loss, however, is never limited to the walls of the house. Falling into a gothic dream beside the river, the speaker wonders: “Do you ever feel like nature’s bastard project. / Like everyone is profiting from you”. Importantly there are no grammatical marks of questioning here. Her questioning is prohibited by the form she speaks in. Language will not let her ask. Muted, her dream deepens:
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Senses slide into oblivion.
Resentment becomes a smell smashed inside a rare flower,
only blooming once a decade, stinking as it does,
living deep in the forest of fevers.
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Class is the imposition of abject smells and colours, as she notes earlier on: “I begin to smell compromised, like a worker”; “You are made a different colour in poverty, which / is visible to everyone”. In the dream, though, something is revealed before this imposition of abjection. The smell is not a natural result of wage-labour, and the colour does not come necessarily from poverty. Instead, they are forcibly “smashed inside a rare flower”, producing an outcast population condemned to a forest of fevers. But the marvellous political optimism of Allen’s work is in her focus on the life that grows in that condemnation. In the stinking forest where “pain can travel through space and time”, “a strange form of life” survives.

There, feminised outcasts are thrown into the river. But rather than giving up, they unionise the fish and join their struggle.
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Pain is that fish who
wears a parasite for a tongue; like how I wear you as a frontis-
piece. Or does the parasite wear the fish, and to what enzyme
do we give praise. Who’s digesting who around here?

I am the small fish that eats the larger fish from the inside
out, then sits in her like a pilot
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The stinking fish thrown out to the river have taken charge. A spectre is haunting this sleepy village where a doomed couple lives. All the powers of England enter a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the wine-soaked aristocratic landlord, the “creamy-bulbous” face of the fading boyfriend, the villagers who send the spectre out to a forest of fevers, the medicine she has to take, the hordes of men in fancy dress, the looming church, the “whole country of industrial estates, ballooning from motorways like bronchioles”.

What all of them fail to see is the survival of this spectral fever:
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I rise with time clogging in me
but am growing—
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At the end of the penultimate section in which stinking fish are amassed in struggle, the speaker returns to her ungrammatical demands, accumulating these markers of her oppression and using them as a revolutionary force:
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I have this army
of men’s brains.
What should I
do with them next.

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The emphasis of the “I” at the end of the line refutes the erasure of “I” in the childhood memory of abuse and murder. Now, those who have been refused “I”, who have been banned from questioning, have come together as a furious militia, armed with decades of resentment.

In God Complex, Allen is in exile from everything, but this exile does not remove her from the material and political struggles of life. Instead, she is exiled in the most concrete and quotidian moments, a stranger in the kitchen, a foreigner to her partner, a haunting, screaming spectre in the god complex of society. It does not seem to matter much if the missing man is real, or if the relationship ever existed. What makes both God Complex and Kingdomland so unceasingly exciting is their exposure of the profoundly personal production of class and gender. Allen is writing a communist epic, a continuous hymn for revolution. For Allen, breakups and femicides are equally sites where oppression and misogyny operate, producing the classed and gendered experience of loss. In God Complex, that loss is brought together as a cyborg army, composed of the brutalised remnants of river fish, forest fevers, penniless tenants, feminised poets, and the environment itself. The message to those who claim the omnipotence of God is clear: beware the spectre of Allen’s poetry.
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Elliot C. Mason is a communist researcher and organizer. He is the author of The Instagram Archipelago: Race, Gender, and the Lives of Dead Fish (Zer0, 2022), and co-editor, with Valentina Moro, of Judith Butler and Marxism: The Radical Feminism of Performativity, Vulnerability, and Care (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025). His essays, translations, and reviews are widely published.