In the Spring 2023 issue, our featured author Imtiaz Dharker gives us a sneak preview of her latest collection, where she tells the story of how a ‘Shadow Reader’ once predicted her death in 2022, and her experience of living with that prediction. The issue also carries new poems by Karen Solie, Oli Hazzard, Jane Hirshfield, Randall Horton, D.S. Marriott, Qudsia Akhtar, Christopher Merrill, and Eleni Sikelianos, among others. Translations include work by the German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig, the Greek poet Haris Vlavianos, a Scoto-Japanese-Anglo-Sumerian haiku by Robert Crawford, and a poem drawn from the final collection by the late great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021).

Prose contributions include an excerpt from Anne Waldman‘s Bard, Kinetic, a portrait of her life and praxis as a poet, and an essay by Travis Schuhardt on finding haiku during the pandemic. Elsewhere, Isabelle Baafi interviews Will Harris, while our reviews section engages with new collections by Ilse Aichinger, Rohan Chhetri, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Jane Griffiths, Alycia Pirmohamed, as well as Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan’s anthology, 100 Queer Poets.

Discover more from this issue…

Contents

Editorial

Poems

  • Adam Zagajewski The Twentieth Century In Retirement
  • Armen Davoudian Uncle Napoleon, The Book of Kings
  • Christopher Merrill On Mythology
  • D S Marriott The Terrible Journey of Siméon Piquine
  • George Abraham Field Notes on Terror & Beginnings
  • Haris Vlavianos ‘Identimem Omnium Ilia Rumpens’
  • Imtiaz Dharker Shadow Reader / Far / In The Year of My Death / saying No / But the Radiance / Everywhere the angels / I Walk in the Shadow
  • Jane Hirschfield Body, Mind of the Ransacked Thrift Shop
  • Jessica Traynor The night I don’t think about you
  • Jen Campbell The Hospital Is Not a Place for Bodies
  • John Wedgwood Clarke Divinations at the Abandoned Tin-Streaming Works
  • Jennifer Grotz In Sicily
  • Jennifer Reimer Recio A Month After The Failed Military Coup
  • Joel Anthony Harris A Julie Mango Ripe with Promise
  • John Challis Junctions
  • Maya C Popa You Are Here
  • Kwame Dawes The Vows
  • Karen Solie Horseshoe / The Snowplow
  • John McCullough Queer Studies
  • Vasiliki  Two Hundred Years of Greek Independence
  • Richard Skinner Cherry Tree
  • Nicholas Hogg UFO
  • Qudsia Akhtar Disenchantment (III)
  • Oli Hazzard Postpositivity in Spring
  • Robert Crawford Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: Proverbs
  • Thomas Lynch Ekphrasis
  • Summer Farah The Children Are Screaming
  • William Wootten Local Muses
  • R A Villanueva Hallelujah sings the choir and I
  • Ulrike Almut Sandig we were here
  • Tarik Dobbs The Writer Rings Home

Selected Essays & Reviews

  • Anne Waldman Prelusion. An exclusive excerpt from Bard, Kinetic Turn Away and Face Me
  • Isabelle Baafi interviews Will Harris Turn Away and Face Me
  • Francesca Peacock A Hole in Time’s Glove.Three collections whose inventive mythmaking remaps historical landscapes
  • Ben Philipps Echoes of a Forgotten Song. Three collections that explore the complexities of history and homegoing
  • James Butler-Gruett Literally Nobody. Three collections that take aim at myths and their misses
  • Daniel Fraser Ghost Estates. Two collections that examine the aftermath of conflict
  • Christopher Madden Sense and Sexuality. Three books which reconsider paradigms of queer identity
  • Travis Schuhardt Broken Silence. On finding haiku during the pandemic

Subscribe to Poetry London

Subscribe today!