A recurring dream featuring supermarket cheese aisles and knitting nurses circles around the same persistent question and painful realisation in Kerry Byrne’s tautly written and moving short fiction, ‘Miscarry’.
In this vivid, mystical poem, Selin Genc dives into the flowing relationships between body, space and spirit, abundance and lack, and asks how life can be lived between the extremes of excess and nothing at all.
Laura Warner’s poem explores the effect of direct conversation with the vagina, and how the words and language we choose to use can alter our relationship and power dynamics with our bodies.
Though adorable in shape and size, Oriana Rose’s As I Fall Apart is anything but. Packing a necessary punch when discussing contraceptives, menstruation and gender, Rose and Natasha Natarajan’s stunning work problematises all three in the pursuit of liberation.
Hannah Hodgson’s latest collection of poetry, 163 Days, powerfully bridges the gap between body and mind, the lived experience of disability and the medical establishment’s version of it, writes our reviewer Clare Moore.
In this poetic prose piece, Jane Hartshorn’s experience of Compulsive Skin Picking Disorder leads her to explore – through physical encounters, popular culture, and past relationships – the connections that we try to see between the disparate elements of our lives, in twists and turns that often have no neat resolution.
In these five lush, beautifully written sonnets, Linda Dove explores the intricacies of touch – our need for it, our dismissal of it, and our changing senses in a world where our hands are becoming “unused things, frayed thread, dull knife”.
Skiing down the snowy mountains of Virginia, Clare Moore learned to explore, to venture, to extend the limits of the possible and confront what Simone de Beauvoir once termed as the ‘timidity’ inhibiting women physically to be in the world.
In these captivating poems from their joint project, Wendy Allen and Charley Barnes explore the fluid relationship of two narrators to their bodies, to the people surrounding them, and to the physical spaces their bodies occupy.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals shine with moonlight and rain-washed landscapes, but did her later illness inhibit such vision? No, writes Iona Glen, who, when considering the poetry and criticism of Polly Atkin, sees Wordsworth’s creativity flourish in her periods of ill health.
