Rosa Fernandez, "Bite Me"

Rosa Fernandez, photograph by Kulvir Bhambra

Rosa Fernandez is a spoken word artist, musician and and two-time Word! Slam winner who has performed at venues and festivals across the UK and been published in the UK (various anthologies, Bite Me pamphlet by Bookishly) and Canada (Untethered magazine). With a degree from Goldsmiths College in English Literature, followed by a few years of nearly being famous as a pop star, Rosa has at least fifteen years of experience in editing, proofreading and publishing every kind of art form, running a blog of reviews of films, Netflix series, art exhibitions and poetry collections.

Rosa has performed in various guises at numerous venues nationwide, from singing songs from films in a burlesque showcase to writing and performing monologues, from headlining festivals and starring in a music video to performing stand up and hosting poetry nights dressed in ridiculous costumes; she brings her unique perspective, gentle whimsy and firm sense of socialist feminist justice to every performance. Otherwise, she can often be found wearing a hat and thinking about biscuits. Her poems have toured the nation in the back of a transit van, and it sometimes sounds like it.

Rosa’s upcoming poetry performances include co-hosting RunYour Tongue at the Exchange on Wednesday 23 November, a feature performance at Word! Slam at the Attenborough Arts Centre on Thursday 24 November and a feature performance at a fundraising event for Save Weekley Hall Wood on Friday 25 November at Kettering Arts Centre. Rosa will also be performing poetry and songs at the Clarendon Park Christmas Fair on Queen’s Road on Sunday 4 December, and would be delighted to see you at any of these events, particularly if you want to buy her pamphlet or haiku zines as excellent Christmas gifts!

 

About Bite Me, by Rosa Fernandez

Food is so much more than just fuel; it is opinion, memory, trigger, treat, and is at times just funny all by itself.

In this tasty selection box, Rosa Fernandez celebrates all the things we might consume and why, whether toast will actually kill you, and why the kitchen is the best place in the house. Crumbs!

You can read more about Bite Me on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read  a sample poem from the collection.  

From Bite Me

Choke

I left all your words in.
You piled them all up
Into the imaginary;
You needed somewhere
Where they could disappear.
 
Shoved under the stairs
The words are dusty,
Fading, crumbling;
I put one in my mouth
Occasionally, for fun.

Pam Thompson, "Strange Fashion"

Pam Thompson is a writer and lecturer based in Leicester. Her publications include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time (Smith | Doorstop, 2006). Pam has a PhD in Creative Writing and her second collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam is a 2019 Hawthornden Fellow. She is on Twitter @fierydes

About Strange Fashion

Pam Thompson’s second collection bursts with strangers and with intimates, with colour and with cool dispassion; these poems travel the world and through history from the Belfast Troubles to slave smuggling in Illinois, from out-of-season Alicante to a croft in the Scottish Highlands, to parachuting from the St. Louis Gateway Arch. They take us into the worlds of artists via the imagined lives of assistant to Louis Daguerre or Georgia O’Keeffe, and sail confidently out into the fantastical: witness Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson hunting for antiques in Church Stretton or the journalist trying to winkle tidbits from Virginia Woolf in an elevator.

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

From Strange Fashion, by Pam Thompson

Shifts

(i.m Mildred Thompson 1919-2015)

That night, I was too young
To understand why she cried
on hearing Kennedy had been shot.
She brought the smell 
of methylated spirits in with the cold.

I outgrew my Raleigh bike.
She bumped it along the path
next to the railway line,
her dress, starched cuffs and collar,
stashed in the wicker basket on the front.

Coal trucks rattled past to Keresley.
She’d walked when the past was icy,
Slipped on a stile, cracked two ribs,
Wouldn’t stay put on the settee, was up
to cook our tea, make beds.

At ninety-three she understood
if the traffic held them up. I used to be
a State Registered Nurse, she’d inform
the girls who found her combs,
changed her sheets, wrote up
their notes leaning against 
the fridge. The social worker spoke
as if she couldn’t understand English.
My God – that tone – I used to be …

That January evening in the care home,
they brought us cups of tea.
She was making her way back,
and if the paths and corridors were slippery
it didn’t matter. There was nothing
to climb over, no shift to report for.

The Shipyard Apprentice

(i.m. George Thompson 1914-82)
                           
             Fourteen. Your first day.
The old ones spoke about the Titanic;
the space it took, how it reared above 
terraced houses. When you dared a smoke 
in the dry dock, you could almost hear 
women laughing, a crack of glass 
against steel, glimpse taffeta, crèpe de Chine.

              Youse’ll be safe here 
when we kick those bastards out.

Taigs. New name in your mouth.
Theirs, the worst job—
painting hulls with ‘monkey-dung.’
It floated like dirty snowflakes.
You could taste it, feel it lining your lungs.

             Dusk. Swaying on a tram 
to the shut-down shop on Sandyrow 
where shoes lay on racks, heels still unmended. 
She’d seemed well when you left.
The invasion of neighbours. This, then the war; 
no-one to straighten your lapels for either.