Fragile July by Oscar Nearly is a prose-poem of obsessive reconstruction, circling a single childhood summer in which the ordinary textures of suburbia, garden games, disposable-camera snapshots, pop songs, and family rituals begin to feel charged with threat. Built from repetition, incremental shifts, and documentary attention to objects and photographs, the text tests how memory hardens into narrative, how evidence both clarifies and corrupts, and how dread can arrive retrospectively as a structure imposed on the past. Its atmosphere is uncanny rather than overtly surreal, with domestic scenes tightening around pits, locked spaces, missing rooms, and half-seen figures at windows, while the book’s origin in performance and installation gives its visual material a parallel weight, making image and recollection contend for authority.  
 
PRAISE for Fragile July:
Memory is as wilful as weather in Oscar Nearly's Fragile July, a beautiful, beguiling remembrance of a childhood summer and the storms that circled it. This book swept me up and away.
   — Derek McCormack
 
With this small, soft, terrifying book, Nearly pulls off something completely new and brilliant.
   — Noreen Masud
 
How delicate or fractured can a summer be, and still remain whole? Oscar Nearly’s Fragile July, composed in perfect little prose blocks, seems co-constituted by its own self-effacement: a confessed ‘work in progress’, it recalls a non-linear series of memories, in the hope perhaps that written (or spoken) recollection might make personal history more certain, or concrete. As if you can convince yourself of your past by writing it down, like this. As if a childhood summer, ‘perverted’ by unspecified forces, could be understood in its totality, even with a gaping hole at its centre. Streaked through with Nearly’s own ‘photograph-scented’ photographs, shadowy, beautiful and generic, we are invited to align these images with the prose vignettes which may, at times, describe them. The effect is one of both snapshot and blur, of a summer re-refracted, like uneasy summer light in the surface of a photograph.
   — Imogen Cassels
 
In Fragile July, nostalgia — solitary, finite, & keenly inspectable — depends upon itself, suspends its own belief, & prefers the quasi-transparent tea leaves of examined life to whatever else, aware as it is of it’s nature as performance & document on the verge of interdisciplinary death. I think of John Dewey’s Art as Experience & of Mark Fisher’s The Weird & the Eerie as lenses by which to see Nearly’s investment in the sunk cost of languageable experiential remembrance as rudiment to sentence & story structure & how scenes from life write into themselves in hidden demarcation or accession &/or deaccession of various details/words. When we write about life or memory we write into the distance between; it’s about something that curates itself by proxy in the eerie neglected ethos of a kind of Britishness, of whiteness, of family, of state, of boyhood friendship, of the free thought-time of childhood, of middle class-ness, ‘the neighbors’, or of the relation between one’s hometown or neighbourhood & the world. In all its (d)escalations & omissions, annexed contexts, & mysteries, there is lack. That lack is indefinite, sticky. Not definitively non-poetry poetry or non-fictional fiction or non-memoir-ish memoir but talk, décomposé. The archivist, ever the remember-er notates an at once neurotic & pious obedience to basics. You may suddenly realise you are reading a poem.
Narration through POV is a docent all about itself, its directions, its hesitations, its machinations, its arcanities — microfiche, slides, photos, books, collections; our archives (whether of the eye or institutional or familial) who spend their lives burrowed in the smegma of our sense like mites in flecks of skin waiting to be digitised or digested by us &/or for us turn in Fragile July into photographic memory on its ear followed by a canal to thought, smell, taste, touch & beyond our sonal metrics. Let its materialities automate your gaze, let it scope the scene while you ruminate, It’s important to be bored enough to notice the little things, political to be absent. Your attention is a surveillance tool & your reading is of a prolonged staring. Particles when observed gesture a poetics; great feats of life, death, surreality, & beauty emerge if you are buddhist enough. Breathe as you let sentences follow one another carrying other sentences on their backs, an entire planet not unlike our own will slowly turn to watch you read this humble diary . . . I looked so long I began to see the words melting off the page. They warped into dancing sisters circling my iris’ maypole all by accident. It’s kind of a Rorschach test. You might see a nuclear disaster of molecules splitting & presenting themselves in subtle self-destruction... & as you surveil, you may just witness the swan song of humanity’s sunset through the window of your Aviators like a catatonic patient who’s void expression is only ever punctuated when the nurse comes round for checks every 15 minutes. Put simply, let Fragile July drive you crazy. It’ll make you better too.
   — Jordan/_ Hell
 
ABOUT Oscar Nearly:
Oscar Nearly is a writer, artist and researcher. Their work has appeared at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Crossness Pumping Station and Corsica Studios, and has been published in the TLS, 3:AM Magazine, and King’s Review. They are currently pursuing a PhD at Queen Mary University of London on abandoned websites and ruins of the internet.