Thin Slices: Focussing the Lens, Review of Caitlin Stobie’s Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022)

Abstract

Caitlin Stobie's collection of poems, Thin Slices, is an experiment in form, literature, philosophy, science, and nature. In science, thin slicing is a method of preparing samples for observation in the field of microscopy, while in psychology, thin slicing refers to the process of the unconscious mind making judgements based on narrow windows of experience. In Stobie's collection, it becomes a literary methodology, too. This short review focusses on how Stobie's intersecting interests in reproductive health, literature and ecology are isolated, magnified, and approximated using poetry as a form of thin slicing.

Keywords:

• south african poetry
• abortion ecologies in southern african fiction
• thin slicing
• literary methodology
• thin slices

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Livingstone’s ‘Gentling a Wildcat’ and the ‘science’ poems from A Littoral Zone in Douglas Livingstone: Selected Poems (Ad. Donker, Johannesburg, 2004), 44–5 and 97-122, respectively.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Mann

David Mann is a writer, editor and arts journalist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in AFREADA (UK), Portside Review (AU), Sunday Times Books, Imbiza Journal, Ons Klyntji, The Thinker and New Contrast.