“A Precise Chaos examines, with profundity, intricate human patterns of memory, history, and love, where the personal and the political intertwine and nothing ends cleanly because nothing is ever entirely lost.”
“Mort’s collection is cut through with her work as a journalist covering the Israeli-Palestine conflict, yet somewhat refreshingly, in a voice unwilling to take sides. Her speaker is a citizen of the world: ‘Whoever visits history gets to write it’ they say in ‘Sunday in Gdansk’, a guest at the table. In ‘Snapshots from Brač’ that same speaker acknowledges the wisdom that ‘[y]ou should die in your own language’, but only through the voice of another. A life in transience is the closet thing to peace available; there is always ‘advantage in a new landscape’, even and especially while ‘a safety belt’ straps in old memories. As the title suggests, what anchors A Precise Chaos are moments of compounded realisation in history’s stuff: the ‘dust of centuries’ that arranges itself into ‘organised rubble’. Showing her education in philosophy, the materialisation of ideas happens in sense and object: ‘the dexterity of touch’, ‘your hand on the doorknob’, ‘a diamond locket around my neck’. And clarity comes in Lear-like riddling as when skin is ‘leathery and lined’, feet are sucked into a grave ‘like suction’ and rugs are placed ‘one by one, first one and then the other’.”
–Lucy Cheseldine, Stand Magazine, #244