In this gorgeously vivid and whiplash smart short story, Paula Coston plunges us into the world and bodily experiences of Maggie Chine, a 70-year-old woman who continues to live life to its fullest.
During lockdown, the study of German expressionist artists George Grosz and Otto Dix, and their portrayals of women, made Claire Thomson recognise the stark truth of the body.
JP Seabright captures the excitement and ‘gay abandon’ of queer love in ‘Life’s A Butch’ and treats us to a selection of gorgeous visual poems and collages from their upcoming collection, An Attempt At Exhausting An Undergraduate Essay.
Five writers – Nasim Marie Jafry, Laura Elliott, Henry Anderson, JP Seabright and Louise Kenward – discuss what it’s like to write with M.E. and how chronic illness has forced them to discover new modes of understanding, new forms of expression, new realms of imagination (as edited by author Katy Wimhurst).
Faiqa Mansab discusses the prejudice and oppression – patriarchal, Islamophobic and colonial – that Muslim women face the world over and asks for a form of feminism which centres their needs and experiences too.
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.
