Catherine Norris exquisitely captures the intimate bodily nature of loss and joy, pleasure and pain across four poems. If in ‘Motion’ the memorable feelings of hurt and grief slip between tenses, then in ‘Oceanic’ pleasure unspools moment by moment, and the magical knowledge of life on earth expands star by star.
In Alex Keramidas’ incisive poem in miniature, a struggle of life and death occurs across multiple forms – and bodies – blurring the humanity of one with the sinister “insecticide” of another.
In Davina Quinlivan’s beautiful, elegiac poem a speaker attempts to recall and piece together childhood memories through the slipstream of images, characters and moments from films like Blade Runner and Mermaids.
In Bryony Littlefair’s poetic exploration of the everyday, the dreaded dinner party or 9-5 grind are brilliantly subverted to an absurd extreme exposing the anxieties and struggles experienced by all in a capitalistic, corporately ruled society.
Creating a ‘fine latticework of sentiment and language’, Pramila Venkateswaran’s latest poetry collection, We are Not a Museum, resurrects place and memory to become a powerful sthalapurana for the city of Kochi and the lives of the Jewish peoples in it.
Bhanu Kapil’s award-winning poetry collection, How to Wash a Heart, argues for our essential and shared vulnerability as a global society, a keener acceptance of our physical, mental and cultural differences, and a more humane and humanistic social discourse, writes poet and scholar Basudhara Roy.
In their new collection Machinations, Kinneson Lalor and JP Seabright take inspiration from Alan Turing and the world of artificial intelligence, creating poems that are conversations not only between two poets, but between poet and machine. Here, they share their experiences when working on the collection, along with some of the resulting poems.
In these two compelling poems written using the surrealist automatism method, Angel Dionne creates strange imagistic worlds that quietly move as much as they unsettle.
Peaches and pigs, softness and hunger, all crop up and are used to explore women’s relationships to their bodies in Cecilia Knapp’s raw and remarkable collection, Peach Pig, writes our contributor Seraphina Edelmann.
Iona Glen meets award-winning poet, Polly Atkin, to discuss her recent biography Recovering Dorothy, how Dorothy Wordsworth’s illness has been overlooked in academic scholarship, the marginalisation of those with chronic ill health, poems as time machines and much more.
In Louise Mather’s short yet sublime poetry, the body is in turns a miracle immaculately conceived and mirrored before its speaker and an open wound, bloody for all to see.