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
Helen Ivory’s fifth collection from Bloodaxe, ‘The Anatomical Venus’ is a stark and possessing exhibition of female abuse throughout history. In these poems we witness women as ‘other’, she or her who is alienated for her body’s ability to birth and bleed, and objectified for her gender aesthetics. We find here the Venus, the doll,
Well I am a huge fan of Max Porter, his writing to me is always a joy to read as he has such a hold over the written word with his prose being quite poetic, with each word fighting for its right to be included in the storytelling, and the deftly constructed prose he offers
‘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
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
If anger is an energy, then so is love. This collection, a much-lauded finalist for the American National Book Award, comes fizzing with both. The author, Danez Smith, is a vibrant young black poet whose writing flows most often between tender, elegiac confessionals and the incantatory charge of the performance pieces for which he is
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
