Susanna Galbraith speaks to Susannah Dickey about her debut collection ISDAL (Picador, 2023). 

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Susanna Galbraith: Susanna If you had to describe ISDAL in one sentence, how would you do it? 

Susannah Dickey: ‘Hey spoopy muffins – boy, we have a grizzle bizzle of a murdy wurdy for you today, so don’t forget to hit like and subscribe, and thank you to our sponsors, Wigtown Mattresses: mattresses so comfortable, you’ll forget all about systemic violence!’ 

SG: When did ISDAL start? Where did you write it? (Paint me a picture...) 

SD: Let me take you on a journey to the distant past: specifically, 2021. We’re in room of some sorts, if you will: four walls, carpet, a ceiling, even. The walls are a dirty yellow and the window looks out onto a muddy garden rife with horny foxes. On a very very very expertly assembled Argos bed, a sweaty and malign hobgoblin roils around, trying to decide if ‘priapic’ rhymes with anything.  

SG: It’s a book in three segments – ‘PODCAST’, ‘NARRATIVE’ and ‘COMPOSITE’ – each pretty different in form and tone. Was this always the plan? 

SD: I always like to try and get ‘at’ something from various vantage points. 

SG: The opening ‘PODCAST’ section is written in rhyming couplets... How did you decide on this? What did end-rhyme offer? 

SD: I decided upon rhyming couplets in January 2021, and the blame for this can be divided squarely among Hannah Sullivan, Tony Harrison, Lin Manuel Miranda, and Covid-19. 

Living, as I was at the time, in a three-person house share in Lewisham, when I got Covid the only decent thing to do was lock myself in my bedroom for 12 days. In between mad, febrile sleeps and Googling, ‘how do you know if you’re in organ failure’, I reread Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems and Tony Harrison’s ‘A Kumquat for Keats’. These works weren’t chosen for their rhymes – Sullivan’s was one of the few books of poetry locked in my room with me, and my friend Dane was writing his thesis on Harrison. One evening, to compound matters, my housemates shouted from downstairs that they’d subscribed to Disney Plus with the purpose of watching Hamilton – they slid a sheet of paper with the log in details under the door. 

There’s something really dangerous about watching a group of talented performers rap for three hours while you have a high fever: you start to think that rap is maybe the only worthwhile art form, and that maybe you should be doing it. After watching it, I opened the Word doc which had all the scraps of a nothing-poem, and I started rewriting it. As Harrison puts it, “Today I found the right fruit for my prime.” 

About three days and 40 pages of couplets later, it was clear the poem couldn’t be about the Isdal Woman – because there had never been a way for me to write about the Isdal woman. The poem needed to be about how ‘we’ handle the material of her life. The rhymes felt to me an intuitive mirror for the stringent, tightly scripted shape of a 10-part True Crime podcast – they were inappropriate; they often required desperate contortions of language and thought to persist; they were juvenile and dependent on tangents. John Steen writes this about rhyme: “Rhyme is not a technique these poets can be said to master, but the insistent troping of what is, in barely registered echoes, unbearable”. I’m interested in his use of this word, “unbearable,” because it feels so laden with meaning: the rhyme tries to contain that which can’t be borne by the ‘vessel’ of poetry, and that unbearability then casts itself back upon the poet – having recognized their chosen form as incapable of bearing becomes a catalyst for unpredictable negative affects. For my purposes, though, I wondered if it could mean one more thing: could it also apply to trying to write a subject that was, itself, unbearable? I needed to find a way to formally bear the unbearable. The rhymes provided a propulsion that seemed to formally mimic the mercenary expedience of the episodic podcast form – each line sped toward its phonetic twin, just as the hosts leapt from lead to lead in the fruitless pursuit of answers. Maggie Nelson writes in The Red Parts that she felt ashamed at having written a “murder without a story”, but I think the alternative might be much worse. The story-making of True Crime is more important to the genre than the subject around whom the story is being made, because the subject is chosen to fit the form, rather than the other way around. The rhymes felt to me like a way of formally showing that. 

SG: The ‘NARRATIVE’ section could be described as an essay... is that how you think of it? 

SD: I reckon it doesn’t hurt to try and carve out some distinctions between forms. I think an essay in a poetry collection is different from an essay not in a poetry collection, but that doesn’t mean it’s a poem. 

SG:  published many pamphlets in the past. Is ISDAL a complete departure from these, or does it follow on in any way? 

SD: I think what I love about pamphlets is it gives you the means to approach a much smaller project with serious intent, but with the freedom to try things that excite you in the moment but that wouldn’t necessarily sustain you through a whole book. A pamphlet has an ending, which means that for me it’s always made it easier to close the door on it rather than dragging an idea uselessly along with me. None of the work in ISDAL appears in my pamphlets, but I couldn’t have written ISDAL without them, because they offered me the space to try things out in quite a low-stake, but still purposeful, medium. 

SG: Are you interested in true crime in general, or was it just the Isdal Woman’s story? Part of what the book does is circle, question and probe at the ethics around telling the story of someone’s death without their ability to give consent. Even so, was this something you had to grapple with, taking this subject on yourself? 

SD: When it comes to the Isdal Woman, I have no claim to her; no reason, really, for having chosen to write about her. 

Except I do, or I did, have a reason. It was just a reason I’m now ashamed of.

I’ve always loved grisly, heavily-stylized, garishly artificial depictions of bodily violence – at one point in Jane: A Murder, Maggie Nelson asks, ‘Can anyone like blood the way one likes the mountains or the sea?’ and maybe…yes. But this love has never really gone as far as True Crime (although I did take to ‘Death in Ice Valley’ with enthusiasm), but it’s likely it would have done had I been born 5 years later. In fact, it was a friend of mine who first told me about the Isdal Woman: “this seems like it would be exactly your kind of thing.” 

In the second section of ISDAL, I draw upon Judith Butler’s Precarious Life as a means of trying to understand the cognitive othering that needs to occur to enjoy True Crime, the othering that not only prevents us from seeing ourselves as the victim, but that also prevents us from seeing, and grieving the victim: “To grieve the ‘other’ would be to challenge the membrane between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, to question what lives are presented as real, and what lives are presented as unreal.”

Maybe, as a woman, there’s a self-protective element to ravenously consuming the images and details of other women’s deaths. If you choose to view it as entertainment, and allow it to entertain you, then you’re about as psychologically removed from the victim as it’s possible to be: you become voyeur, not victim, and as long as you’re not like the victim, the pervasive and frightening violence that exists around you can’t touch you. It’s not a mode of thinking that is useful or generative, but it makes sense. 

It was when I started to think about critiquing the means of depicting the Isdal Woman, rather than writing about her, that the book began to take shape. Also, strangely, it wasn’t until I changed my focus in this way that the book began to feel like elegy. Since coming to understand how elegy has the potential to be a space for resistance, it has struck me that the book very much wants to be a work of elegy, because I want it to be a work of resistance. I have no clear reason to mourn the Isdal Woman, but I do mourn her dignity, and I mourn the dignity of True Crime’s subjects more broadly. I also mourn what gets lost when we’re forced to recognize our own susceptibility to victimhood, which is where the final section of the book comes into play. 

SG: With subjects like this, what can poetry offer that true crime genres can’t? 

SD: The kind of thinking that gets to happen when you’re not trying to make money. So, in other words, thinking.  

SG: Empathy, continuity, mortality, trauma… these feel like some of the main concepts at stake in ISDAL… would you agree? (Is there anything you’d add?)

SD: There’s a bit in Denise Riley’s Impersonal Passion where she talks about what kind of answer could be given in response to the question “Do you love me?” Riley says this:

“[O]ne obvious rhetorical retort to this anxious why me – ‘‘Why not you?’’ – is certainly not what the questioner’s Why do you love me? could ever be relieved to receive. Nor would the sick person be at all diverted to hear ‘‘Why not you?’’ For this why not is a brusque shorthand: in the nature of things, there is arbitrariness. Put up with it! Why shouldn’t it be you who’s ill? This is why the apprehensive lover who has asked, ‘‘Why me, why do you want me?’’ wouldn’t be greatly reassured to have ‘‘But why not you?’’ flung lightly back at her, since it makes one truth clear; that lovers are interchangeable, that it’s contingency which is determining, that while she is perfectly good as a candidate for the job, one object of passion might perfectly well have been another, and doubtless soon will be.” 

When we hear about a person being murdered, it’s intuitive to wonder, “Could I be murdered?” If we were to ask this, and someone responded, “Why not you?” we might panic – who wants to think about the possible arbitrariness of their own being murdered? But what comes after the panic, though? What could come, after the panic? What if it was a sense of community, or a duty of care to our fellow potential victims? 

If it’s important to us that love seem dependent on our own rarity, our individual distinctiveness, maybe empathy should require our ubiquity, our fundamental interchangeableness. If we aren’t the person getting murdered, what if that’s just luck of the draw? Fortune has rescued us, this time, from dying at the hands of another, but is there any guarantee we’ll be so lucky next time? If you a member of a group that typically falls victim to violence, your not being the victim this time was not necessarily within your control. If we hold this idea in mind, it encourages, if you’re doing the right kind of thinking, a sense of shared responsibility toward one another, a shared rejection of the conditions that conjure our arbitrary but inescapable victimhood. It should encourage fear, but also anger. 

As Butler writes “I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start”. This way of thinking is a problem for True Crime, which has as its primary goal entertaining the largest possible audience. True Crime needs to find a way to answer the question, “Could I be murdered?” with “Of course you couldn’t.” True Crime can’t reveal its victims’ essence, because very often that essence is just that they had the misfortune of being part of a group deemed disposable. True Crime can’t reveal the perpetrator’s essence, because that would probably look something like this: they were made an agent of the idea that some groups are disposable. True Crime relies upon its listeners’ sense of impermeable individualism: that their ideas, and their choices, keep them safe. The person who died, and the person who killed, need to be presented as so radically distinct that the listener gets to feel untouchable, impervious to the kinds of things True Crime’s victims fall foul of. 

SG: Is poetry uniquely or peculiarly ‘equipped’ for addressing any of these, do you think?

SD: I think poetry’s uniquely equipped to challenge what these ideas mean, I suppose. It’s not beholden to narrative propulsion, nor does trying to disrupt a ‘voice’ or an ‘I’ or a ‘self’ immediately label it as ‘experimental’, in the way that it would in prose: poetry involves really thinking about your own relationship to language, and its abilities or inabilities to prove or make a mockery of the idea of the individual. Once you start engaging with that, all those ideas not only become much more capacious seeming, but the words themselves become much more mutable. A good poem is a room you can’t know the dimensions of. 

SG: Can you tell me about some of the main influences on ISDAL? You reference George Bataille, Maggie Nelson, Judith Butler among others… 

SD: All the lads! Also, Claudia Rankine, Christina Sharpe, Denise Riley, and Lisa Baraitser.

SG: ISDAL orbits a ‘public’ event… what did your research involve?

SD: There are many reasons why ISDAL is a poetry collection and not another genre, and it’s because it’s not really an exercise in research, it’s more meant to be a series of questions, asked both explicitly and implicitly via the manipulation of language. Most of my research was into much more general philosophical questions, because it’s not a book about the Isdal Woman: it’s a book about the about her, if that makes sense. The ‘about her’ is the book’s about. God, about is a weird word. 

SG: What was the biggest challenge you faced writing this book? 

SD: Repeatedly wondering if what I was doing was incredibly stupid. 

SG: Irony and humour seem like important tools in your poetry box… is this the case? 

SD: I really hope so.  

SG: What’s another?

SD: Repeated references to lasagne. 

SG: What would you recommend as the ideal setting for someone reading ISDAL? 

SD: In a grotty little café while you’re waiting to have some keys cut.

SG: Have you really never been to Norway? Would you like to go?

SD: Norway’s real? 

SG: You won the Eric Gregory for your pamphlet bloodthirsty for marriage, and ISDAL was a Forward Prize nominee. Did these recognitions impact your practice or how you thought about it?

SD: I think it’s nice to think that stuff like this brings your work to the attention of more people – beyond that I think placing too much stock in it is a sure-fire way to go mad. 

SG: When did you start thinking about yourself as a ‘poet’?

SD: Once, when I was 23, I went on a trip to Rome with a few friends, and one night on the Ponte Garibaldi a man asked me about myself and I told him that I was at university and had recently started writing poetry; he told me that he was a poet, and he then proceeded to perform a spoken word rap hybrid he’d written, except he forgot it halfway through so had to start again. This happened 3 times. By the time he’d made it to the end, he was so sweaty and sad and embarrassed looking that we both knew he needed to go away and pretend that this interaction had never taken place. All this is to say, if he was a poet, then I’m a poet. I wonder what happened to him. 

SG: What’s your favourite thing someone has said about ISDAL so far?

SD: “Why are there so many references to lasagne?”

SG: If someone loved ISDAL, what would you recommend they read next? 

SD: The collected Garfield comic strips. 

SG: What are you working on now? 

SD: A poem about camels.

SG: What are you reading right now?

SD: Where do Camels Belong? by Ken Thompson.

SG: If a stranger asked you ‘what’s poetry for?’ what would you say?

SD: Getting laid. Also, I guess questioning the structures imposed on our day-to-day thoughts and habits and existences. But mostly getting laid.

Susannah Dickey grew up in Derry and now lives in London. She is the author of four poetry pamphlets, I had some very slight concerns (2017), genuine human values (2018), bloodthirsty for marriage (2020), and Oh! (2022). Her poetry has been published in The TLS, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland Review. Her short fiction has been published in The Dublin Review and The White Review. In 2019 she won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, and in 2021 she was longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize granted for a collection by poets under the age of 30. Her debut poetry collection, Isdal, was published in 2023. She is the author of Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK.