“Queenless – a honey bee colony without a queen.”

Like Johnson’s Sisters, I read this short novel in one breathless sitting. Composed of poetic-prose style vignettes, Queenless tells the story of a daughter’s mixed love for a mother she is losing. The narrative traces their coming together and their eventual separation in a structure akin to a tide breaking. We are left with a young woman learning to live without her gravitational centre (her ‘queen’).

Marcinów is a Polish writer who is also renowned for her critical work in psychology. What stood out to me most when reading was her skill in depicting an honest, potent love between two women. Carl Jung writes, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life”, and I believe Marcinów succeeds in showing in her prose that the paradox is the closest tool we have in comprehending the “fullness of (love)” in its hungry, messy form. A daughter speaks of her mother’s flaws and toxicity, naming their relationship “unhealthy”, but she could not love her more; she could not want to leave her more. The form of this story magnifies its emotional content – comprised of fragments, lyrics, scenes, and sparse, sometimes single sentences. In the white space of the page, we collate these fragments into a whole whilst also having the time to reflect and thoughtfully participate. We grapple with the narrator to consider how we might put a shape to our own love for our mothers, our own inarticulate griefs, our own desire to live in the face of it all.

Queenless will be published in the UK on July 30th by Héloïse Press and can be pre-ordered at bookshops now