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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 [...]
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Online ExclusiveCategory: ReviewsSupriya Kaur Dhaliwal The Yak Dilemma Makina Books, £10 Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal’s debut collection, The Yak Dilemma, is composed of odes to – and eulogies for – landscapes: she is often unanchored in the present, but commits these coordinates to [...]
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Online ExclusiveCategory: ReviewsSarah Lasoye Fovea / Ages Ago Hajar Press £10 The problem with the passage of time is that we can never see beyond the moment we occupy. Our desires and experiences can cloud our understanding of what constitutes past, present [...]
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Category: Reviews
A Strategy of Response: Degna Stone reads a work about race, power and the ethics of conversation
Degna Stone
Claudia Rankine Just Us: An American Conversation Allen Lane £25.00 The epigraph to Just Us, the third instalment of Claudia Rankine’s clinical exploration of the US in the context of race, quotes Richard Pryor: ‘You go down there looking for justice, [...] -
Category: ReviewsBecky Varley-Winter reads six groundbreaking new pamphlets Anita Pati Dodo Provocateur The Rialto £6 Arji Manuelpillai Mutton Rolls Out-Spoken £7 Jennifer Lee Tsai Kismet Ignition Press £5 Lauren Garland Darling Broken Sleep £6 Miranda Peake Yellow Live Canon £7 Suna Afshan [...]
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Category: ReviewsDanez Smith homie Chatto £10.99 homie, Danez Smith’s third poetry collection, is not called homie. Instead, a note on the title informs us that the poems – all 38 of them, spread across Chatto’s wide pages and wrapped in a fluorescent [...]