‘work with the word that is all’; Politics and Labour in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn

Existing accounts of Anna Mendelssohn’s poetry tend to simplify its complex relationship with politics. I argue that Mendelssohn reaches beyond the typical binary of poiesis and praxis, characteristic of the current discourse, to seek her poetic purpose in an engagement with the politics of work. Mendelssohn’s poetry explores the work of writing and the politics of labour in several different registers. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, I pay particular attention to Mendelssohn’s representations of reproductive labour, and the possibilities writing offers to dismantle and reimagine patriarchal-capitalist notions of love and care. I conclude that Mendelssohn’s testing of the limits of different conceptions of less alienated work pulls her verse both towards liberation, and towards collapse.Publisher's note: This article was originally published under the title 'Constructing an Inviolable Space: Love, Labour and Precarity in the work of Anna Mendelssohn'; the title and abstract have since been corrected.