I’m not a huge fan of poetry, okay I’ve said it. I don’t know what it is, there’s something about the artform that I struggle with, it may have underlining issues with how this was dealt with at my secondary school and the bullying that took place in the classroom from my teacher and directed
Gaia Holmes’ third collection with Manchester’s ever-reliable Comma Press is a bittersweet gem. Writing mostly in a kind of disciplined free verse, Holmes runs her eye across a wealth of strange material, exploring the private dreams of pylons, the curious properties of sinkholes and how best to react when transforming into a sea horse. Yet
For his debut collection, In the Flesh, Adam O’Riordan demonstrated a leaning towards the past and a fluidity of form, both of which bent naturally to his rich, allusive style. As Andrew Motion writes in the blurb for this new volume, here is a poet with ‘tremendous delicacy of feeling and expression’, and so he
Illustration © Charles van Sandwyk 2018 from The Folio Society edition of Charles van Sandwyk’s How To See Fairies The Folio Society edition of How To See Fairies is a very special book indeed – it is so magical that one can’t help but be drawn into the world that Charles van Sandwyk has deftly and
Well now, here’s a curio. Billed as a ‘perverse novel in verse’, Did you put the Weasels Out? is several things at once – the tragi-comic story of an Irish emigrant’s blossoming mid-life crisis, a re-imagining of the legend of Cú Chulainn and a formal experiment which begins as a series of Onegin sonnets and
The quality of the writing here announces itself from the start: Frances had waited…for the static to disperse from her daughter’s personality; the obscuring details of herself that got between her and other people and then, shortly after, a storm cloud poured into the shape of a girl. These are the kind of short stories
Manny Blacksher Manny Blacksher grew up in Alabama, but has lived for long periods in Montreal and Dublin, Ireland. Over sixty of his poems have appeared in publications that include Poetry Ireland Review, The Guardian’s Online Poetry Workshop, Measure, and The Maynard. His short story, ‘Des Cruditees’, was published in Blue Monday Review. STORGY Magazine
Manny Blacksher Manny Blacksher grew up in Alabama, but has lived for long periods in Montreal and Dublin, Ireland. Over sixty of his poems have appeared in publications that include Poetry Ireland Review, The Guardian’s Online Poetry Workshop, Measure, and The Maynard. His short story, ‘Des Cruditees’, was published in Blue Monday Review. STORGY Magazine
We took almost a week to surmise it was martial drumming in tattoo twenty feet above their roof. We knew by month’s end other similarly apprised domestic incidents: wedding service smashed plate-by-plate, sheets ripped off beds at three am, keys whipped at heads, and faces pressed—mouths gaping, eyeless— against the window panes in empty rooms.
Leila Chatti Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet. The recipient of a scholarship from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest and 8th Annual Poetry Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets, her poems appear in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Tin House, Narrative,The Missouri
