Archive

And lo! the people came

The Live at the Butchery Zoom readings won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Night 2021 (despite being on at four in the afternoon). Hosts Helen Ivory and Martin Figura tell us all about them

When you are being eaten by vultures they will leave your face alone

Hilary Menos reviews Jongleur by Rennie Parker (Shoestring, 2021)

by Mat Riches — She would no doubt accuse me of esquivalience / if I didn’t tell you about the world famous / fountain designer, Lillian Mountweazel. Despite / her death in an explosion while taking pictures

Voices in a strange land

Feature: The Friday Poem talks to Exiled Writers Ink founding director Jennifer Langer.
Photograph of Kabul Street Art by Kabir Mokamel

This well-mannered patch of green, flecked with red

Carl Tomlinson reviews This Fruiting Body by Caleb Parkin (Nine Arches, 2021)

Inheritance

by Sharon Phillips —My first break from college, on a shift / down the sorting office, I’m lobbing / letters into slots, faster and faster, / having a laugh at it, makes a change / from fretting I’m daft all term

What have you done with the blue, beautiful world?

Feature: It’s New Year — a time for making resolutions to live better. And we have a suggestion ...

Do girls not have fangs?

Bruno Cooke reviews The Book of Bad Betties (Bad Betty, 2021) edited by Vanessa Kisuule and Anja Konig

My Farm

by Rob Mackenzie — Because a true poet possesses transferable skills / and ten thousand hours of staring at blank screens / to note the detail others pass over, I have decided, / this time next year, to become

Let trigons be trigons

Mat Riches reviews The Windmill Proof by Stephen Payne (HappenStance, 2021)

Mottephobia

by Heidi Beck — Perhaps it was a Peppered Moth, / the kind they taught us / proved Darwin’s theory, / changing camouflage to survive. // Or maybe a Pink Underwing, / dull on top with that fleshy startle

We have never seen worse

Emma Simon asks poets about good rejections, bad rejections, and rejections that leave you hanging on forever