Unmastered: A book on desire, most difficult to tell (…or read)

Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary?

Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in fact, quite generally. It presents itself as something more than a book, as a corporeal embodiment of an experience that, while common to most, is presented as peculiarly the author’s own. Katherine Angel essentially seeks to re-create in book form the sex she shared with a lover (‘The Man’). In it, she also discusses the aftermath of an abortion.

The layout of the book is bizarre, some pages are blank, some contain merely a couplet, others a longer stanza, each piece numbered and affected to read like a fragment of poetry or an adage or the miscellaneous leaf of a private diary.