Catherine Morris undertakes an ambitious and quietly radical act of writing: she composes a city as a living archive, one whose streets, buildings and silences bear the weight of unacknowledged histories.
Liverpool is her subject, but the book’s reach extends well beyond the Mersey, across the Irish Sea and outward into the intertwined histories of empire, religion, labour and migration.
Structured around moments of political rupture, Intimate Power resists linear history. Instead, it proceeds by accretion and return. Fragments, archival traces, remembered voices and repeated acts of walking allow meaning to emerge through proximity rather than thesis.
Across its 21 episodes, each named after a revolution, Morris writes with clarity and control, lucid, assured and quietly compelling.
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The recurring “Walking” sections form the ethical and imaginative core of the book: voices encountered on streets, in libraries, docks, churches and archives surface briefly, speak and recede. These moments function as acts of witness, insisting that the city’s history is not abstract but embodied, spoken and unresolved.
Ireland’s presence throughout the book is persistent and unsettling. Famine refugees, labourers, dock workers and women confined or erased by church and state pass through Liverpool and are absorbed into its fabric.
Morris repeatedly returns to bureaucratic language – the workhouse record, the asylum ledger, the marriage certificate, the shipping manifest – and to the way such documents both preserve and annihilate lives.
One abolitionist sentence recurs with emblematic force: “In every spoon of sugar, I see a drop of blood.” Formally, Intimate Power sits between lyric essay, documentary poetry and counter-archive. Its restraint is one of its achievements; contemporary moments such as Brexit or the Repeal Campaign are treated as continuities emerging from longer histories of exclusion and resistance embedded in place.
Some design choices work against the writing. The prologue is overlong, the horizontal rules separating sections feel perfunctory, and the centrally aligned, italicised poems recall an earlier typographic fashion that sits uneasily beside Morris’s otherwise supple formal thinking.
These reservations do not undermine the book’s achievement. Fiercely local and profoundly international, grounded in archival labour yet alive to the present, Intimate Power stands alongside classic hybrid memoirs such as Annie Ernaux’s The Years, insisting on the ethics of sustained attention.
