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Category: Reviews
Patchwork and Polyvocality
Helen Bowell on three books that weave memories and fragments of history into tapestries of possibility
Helen Bowell
The form and content of Nina Mingya Powles’s second collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, is guided by the craft of sewing. The book opens with a version of Slipstitch, the pamphlet Powles published with Guillemot in 2024, in [...] -
Category: Reviews
The Other Side of Language
Jazmine Linklater on two books that explore language and the body in order to comment on sociopolitical structures and their origins
Jazmine Linklater
I remember Nia Davies taking the stage at the 2019 Gestures Conference in Manchester, nestling up to a long table bedecked with mics from panel discussions and pulling one towards her. Without a word, she placed a punnet of blackberries [...] -
Category: Reviews
They Were Here
Thembe Mvula on three recent collections that explore the enduring significance of names and naming
Thembe Mvula
Dzifa Benson’s debut collection Monster is inspired by the life of Sarah ‘Saartjie’ Baartman – a South African Khoekhoe woman who was brought to England in 1810 and displayed in freakshows across Europe for her large buttocks. Our knowledge of [...] -
Category: Reviews
‘to us you return’
Hasti and Oluwaseun Olayiwola review a poignant and illuminating debut, navigating its explorations of community and hope in the face of loss
Hasti, Oluwaseun Olayiwola
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Category: Reviews
Celebrating Survival
Zakia Carpenter-Hall on three collections that navigate grief and reach across generations, offering a poetics for survival
Zakia Carpenter-Hall
Content warning: child loss In Agimat, Romalyn Ante’s speaker – which is presumably a version of herself – wrestles to claim love, beauty, and the ‘magic of words’ in the midst of harrowing circumstances: working as a nurse on the [...] -
Category: Reviews
Uncommon Prayers for Joy
Rishi Dastidar on three striking and playful new collections
Rishi Dastidar
A Sunday night, December 2011. I am in Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona. I have managed to get amongst the socios, the hardcore fans, and am *this* close to the touchline that Lionel Messi is marauding up and down. [...] -
Category: Reviews
Garlands of History
Jack Belloli on three collections that use inventive modes to interrogate and envision beyond imperial violence
Jack Belloli
The two historical narratives that Ishion Hutchinson braids together in his book-length poem, School of Instructions, are twin educations, each charged with violence. The older history is of the tens of thousands of West Indian soldiers, all volunteers, who fought [...] -
Category: Reviews
Remembered, Reclaimed
Eric Yip on three collections that shed light on overlooked and misunderstood figures of history and literature
Eric Yip
Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello begins with a hesitation towards the titular comparison: ‘How could I resurrect you to speak, / when your burial is in no ground / that I can pilgrimage to’ (‘Ringing Othello’). Yet, the character of [...] -
Category: Reviews
The Body in Bold
Aliyah Begum on three visceral books that consider the body within the context of illness, identity, and desire
Aliyah Begum
The body is a tender space, a negotiation between the soft and the sore. William Gee’s pamphlet Trust Fall navigates this experience of the body through the perspective of chronic illness, and there is an aching sense of guilt throughout [...] -
Category: Reviews
Resurrection Dance
Dzifa Benson on two debut collections that reanimate the long-forgotten past
Dzifa Benson
Given that dance expression is so integral to Cane, Corn & Gully – Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa’s hallucinatory debut collection – it’s curious to see that in the short essay-poem ‘Preface’, which itself unconventionally occurs on page 19 of the book, [...] -
Category: Reviews
A Hole in Time’s Glove
Francesca Peacock on three collections whose inventive mythmaking remaps historical landscapes
Francesca Peacock
Do figs fold? Can you fold a fig without breaking it? Does its shape naturally double up and bend over itself? Forgive the fruit-based questioning, but it seems essential to the opening metaphor of Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut full-length collection, Another [...] -
Online ExclusiveCategory: Reviews
Roadmaps to Possibility
Chrissy Williams on three books whose formal experimentations offer innovative frameworks for exploring identity and connection
Chrissy Williams
The first poem in any collection is perhaps the most important. It establishes the relationship with the reader, choosing whether to hold their hand or push them out the window. I think that’s especially true when setting forth an unconventional [...] -
Category: Reviews
Seeing is Believing
David Wheatley on how two poets explore pastoral imaginations, the life of the senses and the language of faith
David Wheatley
A reader of J. M. Synge or the Blasket Island writers of the early twentieth century cannot help but notice how much closer life in the West of Ireland seemed to the American east coast than to Dublin. A contemporary [...] -
Online ExclusiveCategory: ReviewsStav Poleg’s debut collection The City is a work of surreal and fantastical reach. Diaristic in tone, it meanders through cities, questioning their reality and unreality. Circumventing logic for the sake of theatricality, the poems evade natural laws: guitars are [...]
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Online ExclusiveCategory: Reviews
Robert Selby on an engrossing collection of reviews and essays assembled over the course of thirty years
Robert Selby
‘Why would anyone want to read old reviews by someone who isn’t even in an English Department, who understands next to nothing about Theory?’ So asks John Greening in the preface to this selection of his reviews and essays, all [...] -
Online ExclusiveCategory: ReviewsThrea Almontaser The Wild Fox of Yemen Picador £10.99 lisa luxx fetch your mother’s heart Out-Spoken £10 Nidhi Zak / Aria Eipe Auguries of a Minor God Faber £10.99 Outside, the news is always breaking. For Middle Eastern witnesses, the [...]