Viewings - Paperback

Viewings, Alicia Byrne Keane's second collection, works through the many senses of its title: flats seen but not secured in a hostile Dublin rental market, the interior of a body read through scans and symptoms, and the cartography of an island off Galway that was never there. Health anxiety is both subject and method, a habit of scrutiny turned equally on memory, gender, and the limits of what can be verified. Viewings is wry about this vigilance without disowning it, and the attention holds steady through waiting rooms, viewings, and long stretches in which nothing is confirmed. Refusing the consolation of an ending, Alicia Byrne Keane makes the interval a place to live.