{
  "type": "book",
  "site": {
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    "language": "en-US",
    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com"
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  "formats": "Every page has two versions with the same data: JSON (the page address + .json) and markdown (the page address + .md). Append .json or .md to any `url` in this document.",
  "title": "Now We Can Talk Openly About Men",
  "subtitle": null,
  "slug": "now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men",
  "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/martina-evans/now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men",
  "json": "https://www.bookquiver.com/martina-evans/now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men.json",
  "markdown": "https://www.bookquiver.com/martina-evans/now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men.md",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Martina Evans",
      "slug": "martina-evans",
      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/martina-evans"
    }
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  "language": "en_US",
  "original_title": null,
  "original_language": null,
  "first_published": "2018-05-31",
  "genres": [
    {
      "code": "DC",
      "heading": "Poetry / Poems"
    },
    {
      "code": "FB",
      "heading": "Fiction: literary and general non-genre"
    }
  ],
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  "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/carcanet/martina-evans/now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men_978-17-8410-578-5-dc8fe0d5.webp?v=2026-10-16%2023%3A19%3A23",
  "description": "Shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Pigott Poetry Award. Shortlisted for the 2019 Roehampton Poetry Prize. Featured in the TLS & Irish Times Books of the Year 2018. Martina Evans's Now We Can Talk Openly about Men is a pair of dramatic monologues, snapshots of the lives of two women in 1920s Ireland. The first, Kitty Donovan, is a dressmaker in the time of the Irish War of Independence. The second, Babe Cronin, is set in 1924, shortly after the Irish Civil War. Kitty is a dressmaker with a taste for laudanum. Babe is a stenographer who has fallen in love with a young revolutionary. Through their separate, overlapping stories, Evans colours an era and a culture seldom voiced in verse. Set back some years from their stories, both women find a strand of humour in what took place, even as they recall the passion, vertigo and terror of those times. A dream-like compulsion in their voices adds a sense of retrospective inevitability. The use of intense, almost psychedelic colour in the first half of the book opposes the flattened, monochrome language of the second half. This is a work of vivid contrasts, of age and youth, women and men, the Irish and the English: complementary stories of balance, imbalance, and transition.",
  "editions": [
    {
      "title": "Now We Can Talk Openly About Men",
      "subtitle": null,
      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/martina-evans/now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men/9781784105785",
      "publisher": "Carcanet",
      "publisher_series": [],
      "translators": [],
      "medium": "paper",
      "duration_seconds": null,
      "narrators": [],
      "illustrators": [],
      "cover_artists": [],
      "isbn": "978-17-8410-578-5",
      "pages": 88,
      "published": "2018-05-31",
      "language": "en_US",
      "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/carcanet/martina-evans/now-we-can-talk-openly-about-men_978-17-8410-578-5-dc8fe0d5.webp?v=2026-10-16%2023%3A19%3A23"
    }
  ],
  "other_languages": [],
  "characters": [],
  "chapters": []
}