Welcome back to the gutter where the living ain’t easy and the joys of scraping by are . . . well, few and far between. But like, ‘community’. And like, ‘therapy’. Because while everything is on fire you can at least anaesthetise with self-care and yet another instalment of whatever the Kardashians are up to these days (*vomit sound). On the Kardashians, the rats revisit Kanye’s public apology for like, the last few years in which he identified as a Nazi and made songs about hitler, as well as rubbing shoulders with soft-cock fake-goth abuser Marilyn Manson, and a slew of albums which suffered not only from ironic fascism (???) but also lacked the glory of previous albums in which craft was the priority and not flaccid alt-right shock. Can we really forgive a balding bipolar has-been because, to quote his apology, he had a ‘head injury’ that made him think jews bad hitler good? Probs not tbh.

Also; clearly Nicola Willis is terrible at her job. But with one of her few credentials being in English and poetry, the rats wonder what a poet Willis used to write about. Did she subvert canon and use kiwi imagery steeped in the miseries of Sylvia Plath? (Think a pavlova drizzled in period blood). Or maybe she used staccato stream of consciousness, like an affluent Janet Frame, minus the flare or urgency (and talent). The rats can only guess without eyes on Willis’s actual work, but they have to assume she’s a better poet than treasurer because if not, the safest thing would be for this early work to stay buried lest it resurface as just another humiliation on an already long list; somewhere between disappearing boats, e-scooter fails, and a collection of Blazers so plain they’d make Margaret Thatcher look like Liberace.

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