Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Gerri Kimber, "Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life"

Dr Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is the author or co-editor of over 40 books and has contributed chapters to many other volumes. She has published widely in numerous journals, notably for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was President of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–2020). Gerri has made a number of media appearances on national radio and television in both the UK and New Zealand and has been invited as a keynote speaker all over the world. In 2014 she was runner-up for the title of UK New Zealander of the Year for her services to New Zealand culture. Her new biography Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life has just been published by Reaktion Books.

About Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, by Gerri Kimber 
Katherine Mansfield has not been short of biographers since her death in 1923, but this latest biography offers a new focus, where the complicated bond between Mansfield and her husband, John Middleton Murry, is fully revealed for the first time, demonstrating how it was far from the loving relationship superficially portrayed in most of their letters, when Mansfield tended to obscure what she was actually feeling. As time went by, and their literary fame grew, both she and Murry became more acutely aware of posterity and publication – as evidenced in Murry’s bowdlerised early editions of Mansfield’s letters. In addition, there was another complication in their relationship, overlooked by most biographers until now, and that is the covert, long-term bond between Mansfield and the editor of the New Age, A. R. Orage, which, as this biography reveals, truly came to define her life – both artistic and personal – and her death.

In transcribing Mansfield’s letters for the Edinburgh edition, I had already come to a deep-seated understanding of the amount of dissembling in her missives to Murry: outwardly loving, she remained inwardly tormented by the fact that there never was a couple less suited to each other than they were, as Leonard Woolf so astutely recognised. At no point in their relationship did Murry ever truly step up to the mark. But one man nearly always did – Orage. Sadly, Orage famously never kept letters. We only have one from Mansfield to him still in existence, plus the short draft of one more. Nevertheless, my suspicions were confirmed when I made contact with Orage scholar John Wood, who had written extensive notes on the subject but never published them, and who so generously allowed me to make use of his research for this biography. 

What we uncovered together was a deep-seated relationship, both sexual and intellectual, which supported Mansfield throughout her adult life, and which left regrets on both sides – especially the realisation that because of their personal circumstances, neither of them were able to fully explore that relationship. But if any proof were needed of Orage’s significance for Mansfield, they need only look to the last year of her life, and especially those precious few weeks spent together at Gurdjieff’s "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" in Fontainebleau-Avon. This biography traces that relationship, from its earliest beginnings, through frustrations and outward aloofness, to various rapprochements and covert liaisons, finally wending its complicated and thwarted route to its ultimate conclusion, in a way that has never been revealed before. In uncovering the true extent of Orage’s influence on Mansfield, and not just in 1910–11 as was previously thought, it will be impossible for future biographers to ignore what was possibly the most significant relationship of her entire life. 

You can read more about Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography. 

From Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life
The year 1919 marked the beginning of the last four years of Mansfield’s life (though she didn’t know it) – the most successful in terms of her professional career, the most harrowing in terms of her health and the most complex in terms of her relationship with Murry. The sheer number of letters sent attests to the long periods the couple were to spend apart during these last tumultuous years, as the two things Mansfield longed for more than anything (apart from good health) – a stable home life and her man by her side – drifted continually out of reach. Indeed, they were the things she most envied about her literary friend and rival, Virginia. In a letter to Virginia in April 1919 she had written, "A husband, a home, a great many books & a passion for writing – are very nice things to possess all at once." But later that year she would write to Murry, "That's one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together," and ten days later, 2How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call." Just two months later, remembering her utter distress a few weeks previously, she wrote again to Murry: "I used to feel like Virginia but she had Leonard. I had no-one." And it is just this sense of isolation – a lone warrior battling ill-health – together with a complicated, frequently disappointing marriage, that are the overriding features of the remainder of this biography.

Tara Singh, "✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗"

Picture by The Mollusc Dimension @squidhorsecomics

Tara Singh (they/them) is a queer, neurodivergent poet and occasional facilitator, born in Nairobi and raised in Nottingham. Their writing explores the Indian diasporic experience, queerness, gender identity, intergenerational trauma, mental illness, and disability.

About ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗, by Tara Singh

My debut pamphlet, ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗ (Five Leaves, 2025), emerged from several years of engagement with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, a psychotherapeutic model that conceptualises the self as composed of multiple "parts." Working through trauma within this framework, I began to visualise my internal system through emojis, each representing a particular survival response:

🦔 = fawn

🌋 = fight

🎭 = flight

❄️ = freeze

🌝 = befriend

These symbols became a creative shorthand for understanding emotional states and behavioural patterns. I often find it difficult to answer the everyday question, "How are you?"—but I can describe, in detail, how each of these parts feels and interacts.

Much of this exploration took place in collaboration with my therapist, through shared Google Docs in which the different parts of me "spoke" and received responses. These dialogues became both therapeutic and creative, allowing a multiplicity of voices to coexist on the page.

When I began composing ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗, I realised that each section of the pamphlet was being authored by a different part. The chapters correspond directly to the IFS framework:

🦔 = fawn ⚘

🌋 = fight ✹

🎭 = flight ∞

❄️ = freeze ⊗

🌝 = befriend 〇

In this sense, the pamphlet can be read as a polyphonic work—one written collaboratively by all five internal voices. The cover, perhaps, should credit the full IFS team: 🦔🌋🎭❄️🌝.

Below, you can read a couple of poems from ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗. You can read more about the collection on the publisher's website here. 

From ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗

part of that world 

look at this house
it is not neat to end up with a girl who
doesn't seem to have a collection
of anything to make complete

there is no trove or treasure
no wonders or cavern
looking around you'd think
no child lives here at all

I'm the first there are no others
my scales are emerald satin
my hair is lush fire-red
I made a wish because I thought

I wanted to be where the people are
one day the girl decides
to take me to that place
what's it called? the bathroom

I'm ready to dance & swim but
she perches me on the edge of ugly coral
I want to ask Matey all my questions
he's gruff & unfriendly

I watch the bath being filled with
what do you call them? bubbles
they're flat
I wait for an invitation to play

the father comes in the girl seems
to forget I'm there I try to shut my eyes
then I remember my eyelids are plastic
the father leaves the girl seems to

forget what happened
she gets into her nightie
I try to say something but
I remember I'm not real

(taken from "freeze" chapter❄️⊗)
 

The Summer Holiday I Decide to Fight

His elbows have jigsaw bends so
he can punch in a weak plastic way
a boy in Derby sold him to me for £1.99

Brother's vest, clammy eggs in tigger cup
gulp don't throw up burpee 1 2 3
Papa's pullup bar until dizzy

The Undertaker punches stones
I punch dried kala chana, my notebook
holds predictions good guys & bad

I make boy cousins fight, I always win
Baldish is the first to say fists clenched
"boys & girls shouldn't play this way"

neck flushed he points at my chest
"you need to get a bra" I lob the Undertaker
over the fence into bushes next door

My new notebook measures me
every day how many calories I take in
& how much I burn away

(taken from "fight" chapter 🌋✹)

A. J. Ashworth, "Maybe the Birds"

A. ‎J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won The Scott Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The Times Literary Supplement said that her work "displays impressive versatility" and that her stories "do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution." She is the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, which was her own idea to raise funds for The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University and works as an associate editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Maybe the Birds is her second collection and features "Leather" which was selected for Best British Short Stories.

About Maybe the Birds, by A. J. Ashworth
After the apocalypse destroys most life on Earth, a woman makes artificial bird voiceboxes to try to keep birdsong alive. A young female vampire uses her knowledge of mirrors to save her village from the man who turned her. A woman haunted by her past feels that the robins she has always loved are no longer her friends. These fourteen stories, largely speculative in nature, consider what happens when the world is no longer as it used to be – whether in the postapocalyptic future, the paleolithic past or the dark north of the present. The collection is interested in love and loss, families and foes, as well as moments of disconnection and connection. All are interested in what it means to be alive in very difficult times.

You can read more about Maybe the Birds on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Maybe the Birds

From the title story "Maybe the Birds"

I watch the dog. The dog watches something through the patio doors to the backyard. Every now and then his head tilts to one side in the way it does when I talk to him or sing to him. Although there is no sound that would make him do that now. Not that I can make out anyway. But dogs have better hearing, don’t they? They hear things no human ear is capable of detecting.

Like dog whistles.

The low growl of thunder from five miles away.

A million voices screaming from the other side of the world.

Maybe the birds are singing but I just can’t hear them. Maybe there is someone out there shuffling about. Maybe, maybe ... But this is all just wishful thinking – the birds, someone being out there. It’s the way your mind gets in the quiet. He’s probably just got his eyes on all the brown leaves in the yard and wondering why they’re there. "Why all these brown leaves in the spring, Ma?" I imagine him asking in the human voice I have given to him. But I haven’t got any answers. None that he would understand anyway. And so I keep quiet, and just carry on watching as he tilts his head the other way. Not once looking at me. Eyes full on whatever has got his attention through the grey dust coating the glass on the patio door. The little dots of his pupils as black as the night used to be.

Gus Gresham, "Angel Reach"

 

Fresh from ditching an engineering career in the early 1980s, Gus Gresham found his road guru and lifelong friend Laurie lying stoned and unconscious at the edge of a vineyard in the afternoon sun, an empty Beaujolais bottle in the grass and a Jack Kerouac novel spread-eagled on his chest …

They picked grapes in the same picturesque French villages; laboured in olive groves on Crete and pumpkin paddocks in New South Wales; sought enlightenment in India and did the Auf Wiedersehen Pet bit on building sites in Germany. They followed seasonal work doing pretty much everything from thousand-acre wheat harvests to beachcombing. They slept in cornfields and woke up at dawn to wash their faces in the morning dew and start hitchhiking …

Alongside hard travelling, Gus always had a passion for writing, and somehow in between it all he has been a mechanical engineer, environmental activist, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal-skills facilitator, and mature student (MA in Creative Writing; MSc in Building Surveying). Currently, he juggles a building-surveying career with being a husband, father and writer.

His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online. He is author of the novel Kyiv Trance and author of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies. Angel Reach collects his short stories from across 30 years; some are from those intervening decades, others are fresh off the press.

About Angel Reach, by Gus Gresham
Angel Reach explores the human condition through flawed characters whose vital, often strange journeys may bring them happiness or ruin.

In the north of England, a visit from a tall man who smells of rust could be the antidote for Emily’s reclusiveness. But how can you trust somebody if you’ve never seen their eyes? 
A young man who lives in a Manhattan attic may be a prophet or lunatic. In parallel, a young woman takes on social injustice wherever she encounters it. While neither have much regard for their own safety, they inevitably affect the lives of others. What will become of Tabbie and Finn? And what will happen when their paths cross?

Struggling over the death of a child, a man haunts Venice in a modern-day tribute to Daphne du Maurier’s "Don’t Look Now."

On the west coast of Ireland, a bully finds personal and perhaps universal truth.

In an imagined Slavic folktale, Agata faces unimaginable challenges as she searches for the key to her life.

An astronaut is locked in an illuminating battle for survival on an exo-planet.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Angel Reach

One Last Look

I wander the moonlit grounds with a bullet in my chest. No pain, just the bullet. How did that happen?

Has she got snipers on the roof now?

I watch the blood pumping out of the hole in clotted gobs that rhyme with my heartbeat. And even at this juncture, I think about some of the rare, good moments I’ve had with Charlie.

Go, I tell myself. Just go. She’ll be all right.

But I turn back to the house. There’s a light on in the dining-room and Charlie’s sitting alone at the table. I press my face to the glass.

She looks up. For a second, her expression is cold. Then she smiles. Crosses to the window. Opens it. She laughs as I jump through and land on the bare boards.

"You can’t do it," she says. "We belong."

She raises a crooked finger, pokes it in the hole in my chest and wiggles it about. It feels … okay. I put my hands round her waist. With her body against mine, the old chemistry pops and fizzes. In my peripheral vision, shadowy figures pass by outside.

"Don’t worry about them," she says. "Glass of wine?"

We sit across from each other at the mirror-top table. Our faces are distorted and ugly in the reflection. Charlie’s eyes are soot-black as she pours black wine from a black bottle into black glasses.

"I can’t stay long," I say.

She shrugs, and traces patterns on the table with a fingernail. My eyes begin to water, and my nostrils feel harsh. Uncontrollable laughter warbles out of me.

"What?" she says.

"Laughing at myself," I say. "Sitting here with a bullet in my chest and I was just worrying that I might be coming down with a cold."

"Another one?" she says. "Don’t give it to me."

I hear a dull, erratic thumping. I think it’s my heart giving out, but it’s noises from upstairs. Military boots? The butts of automatic weapons striking the floor? And something big is being dragged into position. Furniture? Torture equipment? From a crack in the ceiling, a ribbon of pale dust comes powdering down through the air.

Mona Dash, "Map of the Self"

Mona Dash is an award-winning author based in London. Her work includes her memoir A Roll of the Dice, a short story collection Let Us Look Elsewhere, a novel Untamed Heart and two collections of poetry, A Certain Way and Dawn Drops. She has been published in various journals and more than thirty-five anthologies. Her short stories have been listed in leading competitions such as Asian Writer (winner), Bath, Bristol, Fish, to name a few. She has been shortlisted, and more than once, in various literary awards such as Eastern Eye ACTA, SI Leeds Literary award, Eyelands Literary Award (winner for Roll of the Dice), Tagore Literary Prize and Novel London.  Her short story "Twenty-five years" was presented on BBC Radio 4 and the title story of Let Us Look Elsewhere was included in Best British Short Stories 22. She also works as a business leader in AI for a global tech company. More details on her website here and you can also follow her on Instagram at @monadash_ 

Map of the Self is her newly published collection of poetry.

About Map of the Self, by Mona Dash
Map of the Self is a poetic atlas for anyone seeking home — within and beyond themselves.

In this new collection of poems, Mona Dash traces the intricate landscapes of identity, belonging, and human connection. She explores memory, language, and the shifting borders of selfhood and then explores how the self is shaped and reshaped in relation to others: in love and loss, in intimacy and estrangement, in family and society.

Whether navigating the dislocations of diaspora or the quiet revelations of everyday life, Dash writes with a voice that is both intimate and expansive. She invites the reader to walk alongside her, to pause at key moments along the way, and perhaps to reimagine parts of their own story.

You can read more about Map of the Self on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From Map of the Self

Implications

Born and raised an Indian; not living in India
                                                 implied: not Indian
 

now British, not born in Britain 
                                                 implied: not British
a mother, working full-time
                                                 implied: not a mother
a sales manager, a mother 
                                                 implied: not a sales manager
a woman, a mother
                                                 implied: not a woman
an engineer, a poet
                                                 implied: not an engineer
 
In becoming more than I was meant to
                                                 implied: a sense of erosion
Venn-diagram like I seek 
                                                 implied: commonalities 
finding intersectionality 
                                                 implied: a pinpoint

 
Turmeric

On shop shelves, flavours of peach and turmeric, in little Kefir shots
Cranberry seeds and turmeric, masks and masques in recyclable pots
           Some love yellow milk, drink an aphrodisiac in a tall glass
           steam fish soft in thin gravy, liquid gold on shining white rice
 
Turmeric tastes on the tongue, lingering in infinite swirls
like Jazz, Renaissance, the Beat, a turmeric rage grows 
           in homes, health shops, the patents, the recipes, lotions
           on skin everywhere, in all its fine avatars

But I remember it on my mother’s fingers, her tiny nails
bitten to the quick, haldi, turmeric stains on the nail bed and folds
           from mixing fish-heads, pumpkin flowers with turmeric
           Yellow stains left on handles and plates and clothes

like on this scarf, her fingertips, yellow dots, from far-away home.
 

Drown

You didn’t say a thing.
You didn’t do a thing.
Those curious eyes watched.
Not sure why,
not sure what they thought.

I drowned. I struggled. 
Thrashing as the water rose
in waves and whirlpools
I sank, you watched
You who had said, water
fall in, feel it, let go!
I did,
And you let me down.

The moon, your friend, is glistening low
It doesn’t let me see the shore
But somewhere a lighthouse glows
Surely it will carry me through to morning
When at last the daylight shows.

Elleke Boehmer, "Ice Shock"

 

Elleke Boehmer is the author of a wide range of books including fiction, biography, award-winning history and literary criticism. She has published five novels to date, including Screens Against the Sky (short-listed David Higham Prize, 1990), and The Shouting in the Dark (co-winner of the EASA Olive Schreiner Prize, 2015). Her two short-story collections are Sharmilla, and Other Portraits (2010), and To the Volcano (2019, with "Supermarket Love" commended for the Australian Review of Books Elizabeth Jolley Prize). Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. Her novels Bloodlines (2000) and Nile Baby (2008) were published in Mandarin in China in 2024. Her website is here.

About Ice Shock, by Elleke Boehmer
The year is 2010. An Icelandic volcano has thrown an ash cloud into the atmosphere and, across the world, planes have stopped flying. Leah and Niall, twenty-somethings in love, find themselves strangely restless, and set out on different but parallel paths; Niall travels to a polar station in Antarctica, where the strange, lonely beauty of the ice mirrors the fragility of his hopes, while Leah studies writing in England, surrounded by tradition yet struggling to find her place.

Separated by thousands of miles, but determined to stay connected, they learn that true communication can be as fragile as the melting landscape between them. Ice Shock is a love story that asks what it means to stay close even when we are far apart – and how love can endure, in a world changing catastrophically by the day.

You can read more about Ice Shock on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Ice Shock
Leah Nash was not looking for love. Love was the last thing she needed. That winter morning, she wanted only to get out of town and head home.  

But then the trains south from Edinburgh were cancelled. Floods on the line. So here she was at the coach station, ten minutes to spare, dragging her backpack up into the London coach.

Yesterday’s interview had taken everything. It had felt like her life depended on the outcome—the fulfilment of every dream she’d ever had. The shelf of books she would one day write. 

But had they liked her? The seven blank faces at the long table gave away nothing. She had blundered on through, ears ringing.

"Sorry, could you repeat that, please?" she’d asked twice, three times. "I didn’t quite get the question." 

Niall Lawrence wasn’t looking for love either. Leant up against the coach window, he was trying to get home, too. Kent, via London. But he did like to be loved. That idea of a love-match, a soul-mate—this past weekend something had changed about that. He’d been up north for a school friend’s wedding. Steph, who was marrying Rosie. He’d watched the couple take their first dance, looking into each other’s eyes, faces glowing, never dropping their gaze, and he’d thought—amazing. 

So if someone this early morning had asked him about love—say this nameless stranger with red-brown hair in the seat beside his, asleep on his shoulder, uninvited—then he might have said yes, carefully. "But," he might have added, "I don’t think I’ve met them yet." 

The stranger stretched her arm across his waist.

Inside her evaporating sleep, the body under her arm was warm, warmer than her own. 

Niall felt her breath on his face, feathering his cheek.

A jolt. The coach engine coughed deep and low under their feet. Leah opened her eyes, rubbed her temple. She saw pale eyes, somehow bearably close-by. Curious, maybe quizzical. The man they belonged to must have been cradling her for some time. She was slumped half across his chest. 

Beyond his head, she saw London’s brown fuzz begin to thicken along the horizon.

Sarah James, "Darling Blue"

 

Sarah James (also published as S. A. Leavesley and Sarah Leavesley) is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Nine out of ten of her solo poetry titles have won or been shortlisted/highly commended for an award, including Darling Blue. Her many individual poem competition wins include the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poetry Prize 2024. Author of a touring poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room and two novellas, she also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction. Her website is here. Her substack is reedlike whispering through wind & water, here.

About Darling Blue, by Sarah James
Darling Blue interweaves ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative of love, lust and letting go. The poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite artworks include QR codes, which readers can scan to view the pieces after or alongside their reading. Blue here is more than a colour or inspiration; it is desire, secrecy and sorrow – the essence of "feeling / really alive," yet "distance’s illusion."

While the poems may be read sequentially to give a longer narrative, each one is also a complete  piece in itself, so that readers can dip in and out in any order they choose. Darling Blue was one of the two winners of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024 and also features Sarah’s poems that won prizes in the 2022 and 2023 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competitions.

You can read more about Darling Blue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Darling Blue

Bluebell Blue

          after ‘April Love’ by Arthur Hughes

In this painted pose, everything
except for her hair, face and arm
is the blue of a spring flower.
As if he’d picked the stem of her,
then let the dress shape a bell
around this green heart, drawing

up from the earth and turning
towards the sun. Only, her eyes
remain downcast, gazing into
the space of absence beside her.
The firm tree trunk at her back
is a tangled web of clinging ivy

and shadow, leaves twisting away
from their own heart shapes. Parted,
her lips open without budding. 
The fabric flow of her skirt’s silent
petalled bell is an un-swimmable ocean.
When she steps out of this scene,

this love, will she take her scarf
with her, clasped close as a dream?
Perhaps she will let it drop instead,
leaving its soft curves of sky and river 
to soak up more rain, another scrap of blue
slowly drowned by the weight of mud.

 
Your Fingers

At the hotel room, pressing your key card 
to the door, pushing open my heart. 

A gasp or two later, clicking off light 
and noise, turning on fires inside.

Tracing my lips like the brimming rim
of a wine glass learning how to sing.

Cat’s-cradling my head afterwards, while
I drink the bright sky from your eyes.

It takes hours for my breath to shrink
back to the size of your finger-tip;

I almost believe this moment could last
as long as my life, outrunning our pasts.

Then your fingers wake once more,
to tap-dance on your phone and reach for 

the remote.

I.M. John Lucas, 1937-2025

By Merryn Williams

So many people are feeling miserable because John Lucas, a constant friend and with undiminished mental powers, is suddenly gone. He was 88, but he was still a ferocious worker and never wanted to slow down.

He was probably the last academic on earth who refused to use the internet. Books were his life (he also loved jazz and cricket), and he published around sixty of them, short and long: studies of Dickens, Clare, Arnold Bennett and Ivor Gurney; a memoir of the 1950s (he was an authority, too, on the 1920s and '30s); novels, poems, travels around Greece - I could go on!

But while some writers are interested only in their own careers, John constantly and enthusiastically made space for other people's work. Poets will be especially grateful to him for creating the splendid Shoestring Press in 1994. It really was run on a shoestring, and dozens of talented people were helped into print, and the press also brought a wider audience to the Georgians, Vernon Scannell and Ruth Bidgood.

John disdained the internet, instead firing off letters and postcards to all concerned (although his beloved wife Pauline did once drag him on to a Zoom). He would never have let himself be conscripted into an army or accepted a title. He loved "England, literature, cricket, criticism, history, teaching, publishing, politics, poetry, beer, jazz .... common experience, the regional and the radical, the demotic and the democratic, the poetics of saying what you mean and the politics of meaning what you say." He is going to be missed by, I do not exaggerate, hundreds of people, and I am still aching.

I don't know whether Shoestring will survive. But John's books are still there, and still worth reading, and I hope that some of us will soon be able to get together to share our memories of him.

SuAndi, "Leaning Against Time"

SuAndi, photo by Julian Kronfli

SuAndi is an Honorary Creative Writing Fellow in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. She is a writer, poet and arts practitioner born and raised in Manchester. She is the recipient of an OBE, a Doctor of Arts from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Doctor of Letters degree from Lancaster University. Her awards include the Windrush Inspirational Award, Winston Churchill Fellowship, Hope & Inspiration Award for Work Supporting Black History Month, NESTA Dream Time Fellowship, Big Issue in the North Individual Inspirational Award and the MBMEN Lifetime Award. In 2023 SuAndi was the recipient, in her hometown, of the Manchester Culture Special Recognition Award. In 2024 SuAndi was named an Honorary Fellow as well as awarded the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, in recognition of "conspicuous service to literature."

About Leaning Against Time, by SuAndi

Leaning Against Time is the first substantial selection of poems by SuAndi, whose work – as performer, writer for stage and arts curator – has recently been celebrated by the award of the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is an honorary fellow, for services to literature across her career. The prize recognised her poems’ fierce, vividly powerful and dramatic depictions of women’s lives – in Manchester, the city she grew up in – and of Black communities and the lives of those whose voices are not often heard, even now, in contemporary British literature. In this selection, the rhythms of speech and performance echo off the page. Though she is as at home with the dramatic monologue as the lyric and the ballad, SuAndi’s poems defy easy categorisation and make visible on the page a remarkable trailblazing writing career.

You can read more about Leaning Against Time on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Leaning Against Time

Toast

She offered me toast with my tea
Not cake or biscuits
Maybe because of the hour of the day
Brewed the right way
Like my mother’s teapot
warmed first
Old ways seem odd today
Toast in three minutes
always golden
No aroma
to tempt the appetite
Cookers with grills
foil wrapped to save bacon fat
No bending backache with eyelevel vision
central heating modernised away what once was to no longer
It’s not the same
as when
One fork too heavy for the table
slightly bent by the heat
of a grate red hot with coals
browned fingers
often burnt toast
It made no difference
when laden with fridge rock hard butter
Smells of the old are different to the new
I sipped my tea and declined the marmalade

Ordinary Woman

I am an ordinary woman
Nothing special
Ordinary. Nothing. Nothing. Ordinary.
There is nothing to show
Nothing to tell
Ordinary. Nothing. Ordinary.
I have cut my hair, grown it
Cut it again. Permed it, straightened it, left it natural
Ordinary. Natural. Naturally ordinary.

I have raised children, alone
Born many, lost a few
Terminated one for my survival, sanity.
Paid the price. Murderer. Nothing. Ordinary.

Will you tell of me?
Remember me in history?
I am not a feminist made no stands
Nor have I been the discarded
Pleasure of a man.
I have loved and left. Loved and lost.
Ordinary. No different. Ordinary.

Yet without me there is no tomorrow:
No more generations;
Without me the world cannot last
From my loins – I have borne life,
Ordinary children

Grinded by a man, ordinary just like me.

Do not forget we who have fought battles
Lost and won wars
Worked hard in labour
Settled no scores;
You may go down in history,
We will simply die.
Ordinary. Nothing.
Ordinary in life. Ordinary in death. Ordinarily special.
This woman me, that man he
Please, never forget the ordinary people.

Michael Curran-Dorsano, "Where the Dead Poets Sing"

 

Originally from Minneapolis, Michael Curran-Dorsano is an international artist, whose career as an actor, writer, and teacher has spanned the globe. He’s also a proud graduate of Juilliard’s Drama Division and NUI Galway’s MA in Writing. His poetry has been published in journals such as Vox Galvia, Pendemic.ie, Smashing Times, and Spellweaver, and his debut collection Where the Dead Poets Sing will be released in February, 2026 with Wayfarer Books. On the stage and on the page, he draws from classical and contemporary influences, as well as a deep love of myth and storytelling in the bardic tradition. His website is here. 

About Where the Dead Poets Sing, by Michael Curran-Dorsano
In Where the Dead Poets Sing, an American immigrant seeks refuge in the West of Ireland as his country falls under the dark grip of fascism. Caught between the tectonic shifts of a global pandemic, an insurrection back home, the Irish housing crisis and the rise of A.I., he journeys through dreamscape, memory and song in a desperate attempt to find new meaning in a crumbling world. 

At the heart of this collection is an elegy for the dying Earth, and an ode to all the immigrants, wanderers, and lost souls who fall through the cracks. A blend of the lyrical and experimental, the mythic and the mundane, each poem is a journey toward home, divinity, and a deeper human connection in a world thrown into chaos. 

You can read more about Where the Dead Poets Sing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Where the Dead Poets Sing

To Stranger Shores

Beyond the edge of reason from starboard to port the sailor sees dream walk on dream the feverish memory of birdsong through the cycling seasons swallowed by the sea of autumn leaves that once crunched beneath his tiny feet floating free on the ocean breeze with waves curling steam cresting from the puttering engine to kiss that sacred line between darkness and light rising to join the long sleepless night as root and branch hewn and bound to form his bobbing ship drone with the sounds of the forest floor torn from fresh flowing streams now carven husks that gleam with names of those he left behind in the sunken caverns of his flickering eyes their wick charred and yearning for the dark awaits the stern the wheel of his ancestors turns again his fate their fate he knows now as the sailor plows through the unkempt braids of foam and brine of a strange new goddess

The Invisible Hand 

our violent delights 

unhinged 

with each pendulum swing, 

the stalwart bolt rattling, 

tarnished gold corroding 

the cantilever holding 

the frenzied tick-tock-tick, 

the errant flick 

of some invisible hand, 

shadows lick the walls stretching 

tall than fall, crashing 

to a skittering crawl, 

only to leap up to the stalls, 

mercy’s minister long departed there, 

only empty pews scrawled 

with tooth and claw, 

the babel of the rabble long left to rot, 

a shot rings like bell in a well, 

thunderous bellowing swells, 

bolt, nut and washer break, 

time flies with its armament, 

the shake of rafters as certain stone shatters, 

what breeds in the shadows 

when they lose their master? 

the shots fire faster, 

blood runs from the sun tipped alabaster, 

no words to speak when time and mercy sleep, 

deep sunk beneath the Church 

of this American Dream.

Matthew Paul, "The Last Corinthians"

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025, following The Evening Entertainment (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008) a Guardian book of the year, all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew is a regular reviewer, co-edited Presence haiku journal, has contributed to the Guardian’s "Country Diary" column and blogs here.

About The Last Corinthians
In a variety of forms and voices, the poems in The Last Corinthians veer psychedelically through personal, family and wider social history, pausing for quieter moments. The poems’ themes include: art, particularly by Edward Burra; class; childhood and youth; work; sexuality; fauna and flora; domesticity; sport; suburban nightlife; gardening; end of life; and, above all, the ghosts which insist on interrupting thought. 

You can read more about The Last Corinthians on the Crooked Spire Press website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Last Corinthians

Half Board at the Alum Sands Hotel Again

My brothers and I comb the whole, brown edifice,
like Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, uncovering 
clues in a haunted house. The birdcage lift grumbles 
and judders its Meccano heave, while the intercom 
mumbles cryptic instructions for "Lemonade Doreen."

In the TV lounge, we never watch what we want to—
residents are hooked on Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm. 
We get sucked in too. At dinner, Mum orders us to stop 
fidgeting, pipe down, and not use our forks as shovels. 
The Brylcreemed, Italian waiter teases me, the youngest, 
by asking, every evening, if I’d like "some jelly ice."

Back from the beach one baking afternoon, we gawp 
as a luxury coach swings into the car park: top-flight 
Middlesbrough F.C., managed by big Jack Charlton, 
in town for a pre-season friendly versus Fourth Division 
Bournemouth, who’ve ditched "and Boscombe Athletic" 
since the printing of my bible, The Observer’s Book 
of Association Football. Takes us all week to click
 
her name is Room-maid Doreen.


Fish Loughan

Footbound by your father’s too-small gumboots,
I’m dragged by Maggie, your springer spaniel, 
to the body of water bestowing name on place.

Holly-green wavelets lap nearer every day— 
they blacken when heftier weather blimps in
from North America: Jesus-rays spoking out 
of dark cumulonimbus cracking golf-ball hail.
 
You crease up as unleashed Maggie whooshes 
across the mudbath to lump her walrus weight in, 
displacing litres as if Archimedes were watching. 

From this, I learn life’s travels are not a river, 
but a lake—a Caspian Sea, fed by rivers on all 
sides—whose antediluvian coldness harbours 
sharp-fin barracudas and red-bellied piranhas.

Harry Whitehead, "White Road"

Congratulations to Harry Whitehead, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, on the publication of his second novel, White Road!

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and its annual free lit-fest, Literary Leicester. His first novel The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin) was reviewed as "powerful, brave, ambitious" (The Globe & Mail), "a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive" (Quill & Quire). White Road (Claret) is his second. He’s published short stories, reviews, essays and more in a wide variety of genres. Currently, he’s writing a novel about climate change in the Himalayas. 

About White Road, by Harry Whitehead
White Road tells the story of an oil rig that explodes in the High Arctic just as winter is setting in and the environmental disaster that follows. Carrie, a Scottish-born rescue swimmer, is lost, presumed dead, after the accident. Only she can answer the questions about what really happened, but first she must find her way back to civilisation across the polar wilderness in the Arctic night.

Below, you can read a short section from the novel. Carrie is stranded on the sea ice, with a badly injured back, following an ice ridge beside open water south. The ice is rapidly breaking up after an abrupt change in the weather. And she’s about to realise the true extent of the environmental disaster unfolding somewhere out there on the dark ocean.

From White Road
Clutching the walking poles, she leaned forward to haul the heavy sled, but her back hurt so fiercely she had to crouch down instead. She pressed her fists into her temples. Squeezed through the hood, trying somehow to reduce the agony. She needed focus. At any moment, this ice slab would break free of its mooring and she’d be marooned on a crumbling, free-floating berg on the ocean.

Crying out with each step, she slogged forward over the ice’s dancing surface. Its shivering movement, the way it dropped and rose, meant her legs hardly knew what to do. Her knees gave way at the wrong moment. Her rump slammed down on her ankles, and her back exploded in anguish. 

But now the ice ridge beside her began to come apart in earnest. Fragments showered down on her. Looking up, she saw one giant slab, big as a pick-up truck, teetering one way and the other. Desperately, she picked up her pace, adrenalin numbing the physical anguish.

A tearing clamour, snaps, a series of bangs and then a sizzling rush. The weight of the sled against her harness abruptly vanished. Over her shoulder, she saw it lifted up on a wave of smashed ice and roiling water where the ridge had come down behind her. She had time to take another step before the sled whipped her legs away and she collapsed on top of it. She careered forward amid the wave’s roar. A ball of ice two feet thick whistled past her head. The water and slush-ice gushed about her body. She was screaming. 

At last, it stopped. She lay still, arched diagonally over the sled like a sacrifice across an altar. The water’s confusion subsided. Carrie fidgeted the sled harness from her waist, dragged herself to her feet. The floe she’d just escaped was turning away like some stately liner leaving dock. A mass of smaller ice chunks still cascaded down the broken ridge-end into the frothing sea.

Her arms, her body, glimmered in subtly refracting colours. For a time, she just stared at herself in fascination. She was hallucinating. Then she understood. Where the water had washed over her, she was covered in a thin film of oil.