Use the Words You Have
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Use the Words You Have, Kimberly Campanello, Somesuch Editions, 2025, 208 pages, £9.99.
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Set over a long, hot summer in Brittany, France, Use the Words You Have throws its protagonist, K, into something of a linguistic exile. An American stagiaire enrolled in a French honours programme where English is strictly forbidden, K is forced into a kind of verbal quarantine, stripped of the comfort of her mother tongue. This self-imposed exile is more than merely some academic imposition; in Kimberly Campanello’s quietly arresting debut novel it becomes a crucible where language and identity both come to fracture and coalesce.
Campanello, a poet first and now a novelist, writes with a sense of precision and lyricism that makes every sentence feel delicately crafted, reminiscent of Canadian poet-novelist Elizabeth Smart. More poetic, still, is that the narrative, a love affair between K and her host sibling in Brittany, unfolds not through a conventional plot but as a mosaic of impressions and moments, fragments that resemble prose poetry more than traditional, linear storytelling. This fractured form perfectly mirrors K’s internal disorientation and her slow, careful mapping of a self, articulated in a foreign tongue.
Campanello captures each of the novel’s moments with a sensuous delicacy: the heat pressing down on a Breton afternoon, the tremulous breath of a glance, the tactile nervousness of physical desire. Desire here is understated but palpable; it isn’t seen in grand gestures of romance but in the small, electric intimacies that often evade description. Campanello resists easy sentimentality, instead rendering intimacy as a series of subtle, sometimes uneasy exchanges, where meaning often slips away just as it nearly arrives: ‘I wonder if you’ve had a love like this? If there was a love you had one day long ago, a love that you tell stories about. Do you have the words to write it?’
‘Use the words you have’: not the words you wish for, or the perfect words that might capture a moment, but the words you have been given, are left with.
But Use the Words You Have is not just a novel of desire. It’s a meditation on the nature of language itself. It asks what happens when language becomes a constraint, when the mother tongue is gone and the new language is always slightly out of reach. Those lines or passages that wield their English with the poetic distortion of being something poorly translated from French are some of the novel’s most addictive and softly thrilling.
Words are not only lost in this process of translation, however, but gained also. The title functions as something of a mantra. ‘Use the words you have’: not the words you wish for, or the perfect words that might capture a moment, but the words you have been given, are left with. For K, this means grappling with French, a language both alien and intimate, with all its subtle cadences and unexpected silences. The linguistic negotiation becomes a metaphor for the broader, universal experience of inhabiting a self that is always, in some way, alien or other.
As the novel later jumps between timeframes, and the protagonist confronts her past self in the present, its fragmented form seems to affect a deliberate refusal of the neat narrative arc, echoing the uncertainty of the linguistic exile it depicts. Some readers may find this change in style challenging, but it’s also the source of the novel’s power: a refusal to tidy up the messy, complicated process of becoming.
It is worth noting that, beneath the surface, the book also tells a further, subtly political story. Though K’s exile is voluntary and linguistic, it resonates with the experience of displacement familiar to many who negotiate multilingual worlds and cultural borders. The estrangement, the alienation and the search for belonging here are intimate rather than political or cultural, but they are no less real for it. The demise of a marginalised language, such as the Breton spoken occasionally by K’s love interest, and the impact this loss of identity has on a community, is a clear statement throughout.
What begins as an exile ends as a form of creative possibility. K’s linguistic imprisonment dissolves into a sense of freedom, not because she perfects her knowledge of French, but because she learns to inhabit it imperfectly, to speak herself into being, with the limited, fragmented words she has. Use the Words You Have is a testament to language’s curious duality: it constrains, it limits, but it also liberates by offering new ways to communicate, connect and love.
Campanello reminds us that sometimes the most human thing we can do is fumble along and make meaning with what we have. And, in the end, isn’t that all language really is? A gloriously imperfect, endlessly creative attempt to say: This is me, and here I am.
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Kimberly Campanello’s publications include MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla, 2019), sorry that you were not moved (Fallow Media, 2022) and (S)worn State(s) (The Salvage Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, The London Magazine, Tolka, The Pig’s Back, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review and Somesuch Stories. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. Her latest poetry collection An Interesting Detail is published by Bloomsbury Poetry. Use the Words You Have is her first novel.
Bruce Omar Yates was born in London to an English father and an Indian mother. Bruce grew up in the South of France before returning to London to study Literature and Film at King’s College London. Bruce was principal songwriter for the cult rock groups Famy, who released their album We Fam Econo in 2014, and Los Porcos, who released their album Porco Mio in 2016. His first novel, The Muslim Cowboy, was published by Dead Ink in 2024.
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