The new issue of Poetry Ireland Review features my two-part poem “A Penny for Two Thoughts”. The first part’s an elegy for my Irish grandfather, while the second part is about mummies and the Rosetta Stone. I wrote this poem almost a decade ago, so I’m very excited that it’s finally been published.
Over the past two weeks, three new pieces have come out: two reviews for the Irish Times, and a personal essay in Crossing the Dissour.
Here I discuss three interesting books by Irish-American writer Colin Broderick. And here’s my review of Damien Goodfellow’s graphic novel about the Famine, Black ’47.
In my essay Juxtapositions, I discuss how I use humour to write about death and depression. It came out last week in issue 2 of Crossing the Dissour, which is published by Greywood Arts, a cultural centre in Killeagh, Co. Cork, where I spent a glorious week this summer.
Issue 8 of the fantastic Irish literary magazine Banshee is now available to preorder. It contains my personal essay “The River, The Bridge”, which deals with depression, suicide, and Tinder. It’s my first creative publication in years and my first personal essay, so I’m both very excited and terrified. You can preorder the issue here.
My review of Margaret Kelleher’s excellent The Maamtrasna Murders has just appeared in this week’s TLS. Find it here.
My review of George O’Brien’s The Irish Novel 1800-1910 has just been pre-published on the website of Notes & Queries. O’Brien’s book is enjoyable and absorbing, but I nevertheless have a few reservations. Read my review here.
Later this month, Peter Lang will publish The Great Irish Famine and Social Class, edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray. The collection, a product of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies, features my essay “Transformative Nationalism and Class Relations in Irish Famine Fiction, 1896-1909.” In my chapter, I look at how Young Irelander nationalism is used as a strategy to validate the hegemony of the upper classes in a number of novels about the Irish Famine, including Louise Field’s Denis (1896) and L.T. Meade’s The Stormy Petrel (1909).
As I argue in my essay, these novels “do not present the landlord class as a whole as parasitical and alien, as nationalists such as Michael Davitt and James Connolly did, but attempt to humanize and hibernicize the class, by incorporating them into the narrative of Famine victimhood, emphasizing their self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of the poor, and scripting them into the nationalist story of (intermittently) emergent nationhood.”
My review of Being New York, Being Irish, edited by Terry Golway, has just appeared in today’s Irish Times. The book raises important questions about Irishness in diaspora, and indeed cultural identity more generally. Read my piece here.
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My review of Niamh Ann Kelly’s Imaging the Great Irish Famine has just appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. An interesting book that has much to offer, but it isn’t flawless. Here’s a link to my piece, but it’s behind the paywall…
My review of Children and the Great Hunger, a volume of essays edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, has just appeared in the Irish Times. The book is thought-provoking, though not always in a good way…
I’ve just got the green light for my call for papers for a special forum for the journal Religion & Literature (University of Notre Dame Press) on “Religion and Cultural Identity in Irish-American Literature.” I’ll be inviting some 6-10 experts in the field of Irish-American literature to contribute pieces exploring different aspects of this topic, which is curiously neglected in the scholarship.
Christopher Cusack 
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