In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the figure of the departed Faerie king John Uskglass is both self and other; English and UnEnglish; Faerie and Human. He is one of Strange’s enchanted mirrors, about to dissolve into a road: he reflects back not just his own image, but the gaze of all those who look for him still. John Uskglass is the tide Norrell can’t entirely tame; he’s the dark dreaming wood drowning the city of Venice. He’s the harsh, biting blade of Empire, a conquering King. But he was nameless slave first.

He speaks for those in the North who’d welcome a different King, fly a different flag, claim a different country (“Other countries,” Sir Walter sighs at one point “have stories of kings who will return at times of great need. Only in England is it part of the constitution.”). The King in the North is the living cypher of all deep, local knowledge and history that cannot be tamed or killed by Kingship or country: rebellion, language, and memory passed down secretly and sideways through nursery rhyme and sleight of hand. The darkness belongs to John Uskglass, Norrell says, and he fears his magic as much as he longs for it. John Uskglass rode out of England and took the deep magic—the true magic—with him. He abandoned us, Norrell says. And this is why Norrell hates him, why he calls him dangerous—is it not dangerous to give the past so much power? To believe any golden age long-gone and lost? Is it not dangerous to say: It was better then, and not also ask: better for who? Or maybe the danger of the Raven King is not just of a national myth swallowing a nation and a people whole, but the danger of any belief—that it can be taken away.

Uskglass embodies an England that the Norrell of the novel’s early chapters cannot countenance: a wilder place, a place where the great woods have not been cut for lumber, where the rivers still flow unstoppered by mills or bridges, a place where languages and lives have not been lost to the slow bloody churn of making England English. He’s a living history, but not the kind of history that can be shaped into a flattering and unblemished ideal, sculpted to tell a certain story. Uskglass’ is history is like the many threads of Clarke’s novel—it grows wildly in all directions, a garden left to riot, sprouting footnotes and toppling old, crumbling walls. Indeed, Uskglass’ book—the key, Norrell and Strange, believe, to bringing magic back to England—cannot even be read. There’s no one left who speaks his language.

The world used to be a magical place, Norellites argue after their namesake is gone. But by the end of the book, though they cannot say why, magic seems to be seeping back into England anyway. Earlier on, when Childermass glimpses this deeper, wilder magic, he thinks: “The language or spell seemed tantalizingly familiar now. In a moment, he thought, he would grasp it. After all, the world had been speaking these words to him every day of his life – it was just that he had not noticed it before …” and when Stephen hears the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair sing, Clarke writes:

“Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”

The world Clarke’s characters catch glimpses of is no less magic than it ever was. They just do not always know how to name or see it. But that is something that can be learned. Childermass, having found John Uskglass’ book in the form of Vinculus, sets out to be its new Reader, though there is no one to teach him how. He claims to be both a Strangeite and a Norellite; a claim that baffles his fellow magicians. How can you both plunge into the dark and hold it at bay? But perhaps, in Clarke’s world, a man can do and be both. Perhaps a country can be shaped by its history but not noosed by it.

Near the end of the novel, when Norrell and Strange’s spell to summon the Raven King goes awry, Stephen Black, for a moment, holds the power to destroy all of England. Instead, after killing the Gentleman with Thistledown Hair to break his spell, he turns from the country his mother was brought to as a slave and walks away:

“I cast off the name of my captivity,” he said. “It is gone.” He picked up the crown, the sceptre and the orb and began to walk. (…) England lay behind him. He did not regret it. He did not look back. He walked on.”

He takes up the mantle of the King of Lost-Hope, the territory of his now-dead tormenter. As he enters his kingdom, he observes that the rotting bones outside his hall no longer seem horrifying or grotesque. In fact, they soon will decay to nothing. He tells his subjects—the cruel, capricious Faeries he’s spent so many nights trapped alongside—that:

“This house,” he told them at last, “is disordered and dirty. Its inhabitants have idled away their days in pointless pleasures and in celebrations of past cruelties – things that ought not to be remembered, let alone celebrated. I have often observed it and often regretted it. All these faults, I shall in time set right.”

Things that ought not to be remembered, let alone celebrated. Is he speaking of Lost-Hope or of Clarke’s vision of nineteenth century England? In Strange & Norrell, it is impossible to speak of only one. John Uskglass’ Faerie, like the lost King himself, is a mirror. When Lascelles steps off the Faerie road and kills the nameless Champion of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart, he takes the champion’s place, forgetting his own name in turn. Fittingly, the killed Champion was an English soldier, returned from a war he didn’t remember, doomed to go on fighting forever anyway until freed by death. History and violence here are iterative.

So despite the existence of magic (even fading magic) in Clarke’s England, its cruelties are not spelled away. There is still poverty, and slavery, and war. There are still the smaller wounds of prejudice and Empire, the daily grinding down of anyone in its way. And it’s hard to know if Stephen’s departure from the world is triumphant or tragic: there’s no place for him, really, in the world he was born to, beyond that of a servant. In England he would always be an extension of Sir Walter. That he was granted his freedom, that slavery is outlawed in England itself, doesn’t change the fact that he was robbed of his home and his history. A freedom that can be given on one man’s whim is not a boon but a blade dangling over one’s head, waiting to drop. That Stephen has the courage to leave his precarious life in England behind is a kind of heroism. That to live a life of his own requires heroism at all is a crime.

For Norrell and Strange—upper-class, white, and armed with magic—England is often an easier place. But they, too, end the novel by stepping off into their island of darkness and setting the rest of the world adrift.

““Where will you go?” Arabella asks.

“The world – all worlds – will come to us,” Jonathan tells her.”

Now the darkness that Norrell described, John Uskglass’ domain, is not tomb-like or frightening, but familiar. It’s a kind of freedom, too, but not an uncomplicated one. Though Strange gains worlds, he loses one as well, the warm, loving, and mundane world he shared with Arabella in their marriage: “..she did not offer to go into the Darkness with him and he did not ask her,” Clarke writes. Though Arabella is often off-stage, a seemingly minor character when she’s first introduced, she becomes the beating heart of the novel, the hinge its climax swings on. And in the end she’s not subsumed by her love like the prototypical Angel of the Hearth but instead made larger by it, allowed to choose her own life in the light. When Jonathan bids her farewell, he, like Stephen, doesn’t look back, a strange, compelling inversion of the image of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus’ failure has become a byword for doomed, tragic love. In Strange & Norrell, not looking back is a kind of love, too. It's not a denial of the past, but a refusal of the past as pre-determining force, a fitting end for a novel that grapples with what it means to love a person, or a field of study, or a country capable of both great beauty and great evil. Magic, in Clarke’s world, doesn’t refuse the world as it is or deny its history, but it refuses stasis. In her book she’s done what her characters aim to do: she continually makes the world anew.

“You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?”

--Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

“In many ways the poems in The Carrying were answering the question, ‘Where

do I put all this?’” – Ada Limòn, interviewed by Carrie Fountain

“Where do I put it all down?” I asked this, much less succinctly, and probably less eloquently, after I saw Ada Limòn read from The Carrying more than a year ago now. It was the week after the book came out and she was reading in New York. I only happened to be in the city at the time because I had missed my bus home and was stranded, jittery and overcaffeinated, for an extra eight hours. In another week, I would be strapped to a gurney for the third time in my life and sedated while several pounds of titanium rods and screws were stripped from my spine and my body was hosed clean of the bacteria that had caused an old surgical scar to rupture and swell for the past several months. I tell you this not because I enjoy the telling of it, although there’s a part of me, perversely, that does, but because I don’t know how to talk about The Carrying without seeing my body in it, without my breath catching when Ada writes “and soon my crooked spine unspooled.” Unspooled, unspooled, unspooled, I repeated to myself on the late-night bus home, straining my eyes to read even after the flickering MegaBus lights winked out. Hadn’t I been praying for an unspooling my whole life? For this body to feel like something less than temporary?

Something I’ve always appreciated about Ada’s work, particularly in The Carrying, is her ability to speak with honesty without ever caving to cynicism. These poems are intimately, at times painfully, aware of how we are often only a hair’s breadth from disaster, “always hurtling our bodies toward / the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love.” When I heard Ada read this line aloud in a bookstore in Brooklyn to a hushed crowd that overflowed the seats, I wasn’t thinking about craft. Not about syntax, or diction. Not about the musicality of her lines or the way she sets up our expectations only to perfectly, fittingly thwart them. I wasn’t thinking about any of the things I should have been as a poet. I was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, not to cry in a room full of strangers. What Ada’s poems capture so vividly is the impossibility of divorcing ourselves from our bodies, these little vessels that shape so much about how we experience the world. And there were many times over the years where I desperately wanted to sever myself from my body, to excise its messiness, its constant aching. The way that messiness, for so long, defined me.

My experience is not a particularly unique one—surgeons can perform thousands of spinal fusions a year, and despite being painful to recover from, they are considered somewhat routine surgeries—but when I had my first operation at eight years old, I didn’t yet have the language for what I was experiencing. I would search for it for years, struggling to explain that I felt robbed of something essential I couldn’t locate or name. I think a large part of it was the sense that I didn’t own my body or what happened to it, that other people could make decisions that would shape the way I lived and moved for years. Even now, I can’t sleep on my right side, long after I abandoned my childhood back braces in my parents’ garage (You should run over them, my dad joked when I first got my license, and I laughed, even though I considered it).

For most of my life, I saw my body as a temporary, mutinous container. It wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. I treated myself with a reckless lack of care for many years in part because of this division. I balk at discussing how my chronic pain influenced my mental health because it feels melodramatic or like I’m excusing self-destructive behavior as a biological imperative. Or even that I’m denying that my first instinct, often, is still to treat my body as a kind of collateral. Poetry, for a long time, felt like it existed outside of this tension. A place where I lived without the limits I resented my body for imposing on me. So when my poems, again and again, turned to the scalpel, to the scar, to the rip of bandages, I was furious. This thing was even invading my mind, my writing, the one thing I thought I owned and controlled completely. When I fretted and complained to a mentor, she laughed, not unkindly. Write towards the obsession, she said. What I didn’t know how to explain to her was that I didn’t want to. I wanted to shed the obsession, to escape it, and I secretly hoped that I could outwrite it.

In The Carrying, the speaker’s unspoken obsessions are a constant, absent presence in the poems. The subterranean and the suppressed surface in unexpected ways. In the matter-of-fact poems about the dreams of a drowning baby, in the roots, literal, familial, and metaphorical, that ground the collection and weave between each poem, in the shadow narrative of an impossible motherhood that haunts the poem’s white spaces and silences. Pain, too, surfaces unexpectedly. “It’s taken / a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle / with my body,” the speaker in “Wonder Woman,” confesses. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that reading Ada’s poetry about pain was what finally gave me permission to write about my own. She shares in an interview with Carrie Fountain that though she had allowed herself to be emotionally vulnerable in poems before, she had shied away from exploring her chronic pain from vertigo and scoliosis, her struggle with infertility, and the mental and physical impact that had. She says: “I think, for me, it all comes down to permission and capacity. I’m giving myself permission to write the poems I want—as different as they all are—and I am focusing on the human capacity to hold within us so many different things at once.”

This quote echoes what she told me that night when I asked her about her poems. How was she able to write about the pain and the grief without letting it define her? Without fearing that it would become what defined her to others, the body’s fallibility asserting itself once again? My personhood already felt circumscribed by my experience of my own body. I didn’t want my poetry to be limited by it too. I can’t remember how I phrased my question, exactly, but I remember how kind and generous she was in her response. How when I told her I had scoliosis, too, that my six-year-old surgical scar had busted open that past spring, signaling the metal buried in my spine was infected and would have to be taken out, she looked at me with genuine empathy, not with pity or with the eager sympathy of someone who wants you to just stop talking about it. She told me she thought we expanded to hold what we needed to and that our poems, too, could expand in this way, could hold both the joy and the pain and the margins where the two messily spilled together. Perhaps that is not a very neat or academic conclusion, but it’s one I’ve clung to. The knowledge that I can write towards my own pain and discomfort without drowning in it, that the moments in my writing I fear are overly sentimental or too much: too womanly, too bodily, too self-indulgent, too contradictory, are often the moments that bear the most fruitful revisions when I abandon my assumptions and explore them without self-censoring. Permission and capacity—if there was only one lesson I could take away from this book, that would be it. If I’m honest, though, it wasn’t Ada or anyone else who gave me permission to write the poems I needed to write, the way I needed to write them, even if her words served as a catalyst. We each have to make that decision each time we look at a blank page, have to make it again and again, even when it scares the shit out of us, and it should scare the shit out of us. We have to put it down somewhere. Why not here?