April 2020 Confettied by cherry blossom, I wait for his call. He would laugh at the self-created romantic picture, I think. How I miss that laugh. Every evening for the past month, my lover has rung between six and ten past six. I save my once-permitted daily exercise for this time. He is always finishing
‘Inspired by notions of the animalistic, Humanagerie is a vivid exploration of the nebulous intersection between human and beast […] these thirty-two poems and thirteen short stories explore emergence and existence, survival and self-mythology, and the liminal hinterland between humanity and animality.’ Edited by Sarah Doyle and Allen Ashley, Humanagerie is a collection of quality –
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
News Brief * Going about my day, sometimes I glimpse the news corralled in the narrow margins of my bright screen, and often it depresses me. Like today, a life reduced to two lines small enough to cover with my thumb: Man shoots himself in mall. No one hurt. How quickly we forget these strangers
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
