Laura Besley, "sum of her PARTS"

Congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester PhD student and MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new collection, sum of her PARTS, has just been published by V. Press!

Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of Sum of her PARTS, (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and runs The NIFTY Book Club - a monthly online book club wherein participants read & discuss novellas-in-flash. Currently, she is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her website is here.    

About sum of her PARTS, by Laura Besley
sum of her PARTS is a collection of 30 micro pieces, each exactly 50 words with a one-word title. They explore female body parts and how they are used and abused by those around them, as well as celebrated.  

You can read more about sum of her PARTS on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two sample pieces from the collection. 

From sum of her PARTS

solitary

most days
I like
living alone, 
no one 
to moan
about my
lack of 
culinary skills
or clothes
strewn around; 
only when 
a robin - 
breast aglow - 
frolics in 
a birdbath
or I
almost choke
on a 
piece of 
molten cheese
on toast
do I 
regret certain 
decisions made
long ago.

bold

It's an hour before sunrise when I wake and discover I've turned into a trombone, my body shiny-sleek. I try out my new mouthpiece, a short shy toot at first. Subsequent blows grow in length and volume until I am blaring, brass-band loud. This is my voice. Hear me. Listen. 

A. S. Andrejevic, "Under the Same Moon"

 

A. S. Andrejevic is a Serbian-British writer whose work has appeared in The Lampeter Review, Storgy, The Wrong Quarterly, Scrutiny Journal, The Dawntreader, Scary Mommy, Literary Mama, Brain, Child, and other magazines. Her plays have been longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize, shortlisted by Bristol Old Vic, and supported by Arts Council England. She’s represented by Lorella Belli Literary Agency, and her debut novel, Under the Same Moon, is due out with APS Books in September 2025. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire, where she encourages her students to think big, write with honesty, and stay true to their voice.

About Under the Same Moon, by A. S. Andrejevic
Under the Same Moon is a suspenseful story about Serbian emigrants in London during the 1990s wars, and how their past continues to haunt them, even decades later.

Jelena has built a very English life - now known as Helen, she relishes her elegant home in north London, her doting husband and two children, and the complete erasure of the country she once fled. But when a man she hasn’t seen in sixteen years shows up at her door, everything she’s built begins to unravel. 

As old loyalties resurface and buried memories threaten to destroy her carefully constructed world, Jelena must finally face the truth about what happened all those years ago. Did she betray the love of her life - or save herself from a dangerous man?

Told across two timelines and set in London and Belgrade, the novel weaves together the elegant neighbourhoods of West Hampstead, Soho’s underground clubs, and the shattered streets of 1990s Serbia and Kosovo. It’s a story of memory, identity, and the difficult choices we make to survive - and who we become as a result.

From Under the Same Moon

"You won't invite me to come in?" Mladen says in Serbian.  

"Come in?" she repeats pointlessly, as if there is anything else he could be talking about. To come in. Into her home. 

It feels odd to be speaking in her old language, probably the first time it's ever been spoken on this road. You can overhear it sometimes in Shepherd's Bush or the distant boroughs of East London, where Serbian stores smell of smoked ham and restaurants serve veal soup and pretend cheese-pie (because you just can't get cheese sour enough to pass for Serbian). But everyone speaks English here. 

She manages to focus back on the figure standing in front of her. "You mean, now?"  

He just keeps looking at her, his face still, undisturbed by the rain sliding into a trickle around his square chin. The garden is caught in a side wind and one of the flowerpots tumbles off its stand with a crash. 

"Unless I'm not welcome," he says.  

"Of course you are," she says and glances back over her shoulder. "The only thing is …" She's hoping for a sudden noise, something to make her family's presence obvious, off-putting.  

"U cemu je stvar, Jelena?" What's the thing? 

She scrambles for an answer. "My children are in bed," she says. "And my husband is working. I mean – working in his office. If I'd known you were coming –"   

"I don't have your number." 

"I could give it to you now?" She's never been a good liar, although she did manage that one time when it counted, in the car park at Sofia airport. "I'm free tomorrow. I could buy you lunch." 

"Now is better," Mladen says and makes a small step towards her. She doesn't mean to move but somehow she yields, and in the next instant he's inside.  

Afterwards, she'll agonise over this: would he have left them alone if she'd stood her ground?  

Susanna Crossman, "The Orange Notebooks"

 

Susanna Crossman is an essayist and award-winning fiction writer. The Orange Notebooks, her first English language novel, is out with Bluemoose Books (UK) and Assembly Press (North America) in 2025. Her acclaimed memoir, Home Is Where We Start: Growing up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream, was published by Fig Tree, Penguin, in 2024. She has recent work in Aeon, The Guardian, Paris Review, Vogue and more. A published novelist in France, she regularly collaborates with artists. When she’s not writing, she works on three continents as a lecturer and clinical arts-therapist. A Hawthornden Fellow, in 2025 she is a writing resident at Hosking Houses Trust. Born in the UK, Susanna Crossman grew up in an international commune and now lives in France.

About The Orange Notebooks, by Susanna Crossman
Told through a mother’s journals written while interned in a French psychiatric ward, The Orange Notebooks is a novel about love, and the lost language and rituals of mourning. Following her son Lou’s death, Anna has a breakdown. Once hospitalized, Anna becomes determined to undo death by writing everything down in a set of orange notebooks: tales about her London childhood, her relationship with Lou’s Basque father, Antton, their meeting on a ferry on the day Princess Diana died, a cursed trench coat, the duplicity of beige, Lou’s Jewish and Basque heritage, death rituals, and the role of bees—because their wax makes the candles that light the path of the dead. In the psychiatric ward, Anna meets Yann, a Breton sea captain. Together, they go on a surreal Orphic journey to the underworld, sailing from Finistère to the middle of the English Channel, to try and find Lou at the exact point where his destiny began. Myth and reality collide, allowing Anna to journey through grief to radical hope.

You can read more about The Orange Notebooks on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Orange Notebooks

My little buba, are you taking notes from this book as I write, are you using a keyboard or a pen? Buba, if you are reading these sentences, draw the boat. Add Yann, the boatman. Add your papa, he is calling your name. 

An ancient Japanese philosopher believed that somewhere there was a library, containing archives of all the words, in all languages: slang, literary, polished, idiomatic, and technical texts; manuscripts, scrolls, bestsellers, and brochures, pamphlets, and recordings, hardbacks, letters, and lists. Carefully preserved and classified, there are songs, slogans, and film scripts, jokes, and sermons. Diatribes and cartoons, myths and dreams. 

When I have finished transcribing my notebooks, I will walk through these library doors and seek out the Department for Miscellaneous: Lost Souls. In an aisle, marked Diverse Orange Documents of Differing Dimensions, I will place my notebooks on a shelf. 

I will tell the bees where I have left the orange notebooks; I will whisper it inside the hives. Politely, I’ll ask them to give you the message, to fly to you, buba, on the other side. Bees’ role in connecting flowers and pollination outweighs the importance of their honey chores. A third of crops rely on insect pollination. The bees must be kept alive to connect, pollinate, and deliver words. Survival is about communication and links between things, networks, alliances: pollen, bees, love, and flowers, beige and boys. 

My buba, are you walking along the library corridors? Have the bees dropped sweet nectar into your ears? On your tongue? Are your hands touching spines, seeking out titles and authors? Have you selected a book? Do your eyes look through each page? Are you reading me, reading these notebooks in the library? Louis, I am trying to show you a way home. 

James Nash, "Notes of Your Music"

James Nash is a writer and poet. A long-term resident of Leeds, his third collection of poems, Coma Songs, was published in 2003 and reprinted in 2006. He has two poems in Branch-Lines (Enitharmon Press, 2007), among fifty contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney and U. A. Fanthorpe. Since 2012, his poetry has been published by Valley Press, beginning with selected poems, A Bit of An Ice Breaker, and his first collection of sonnets, Some Things Matter. Cinema Stories, celebrating the history of cinema in Leeds and written with fellow poet Matthew Hedley Stoppard, came out in 2015. A Bench for Billie Holiday was published in 2018, followed by his third collection of sonnets, Heart Stones, in November 2021. Notes of Your Music, a collection of sonnets bookended by two older-free verse poems, was published in June 2025. James's website is here.

About Notes of Your Music, by James Nash
In his fourth collection of sonnets – bookended by two free-form pieces – James Nash sets out to celebrate what may be gone, or flag up what might be celebrated before it goes. From the simple music of the bottle bank (a favourite task), to the biggest questions of the human experience, the poet's gentle, perceptive gaze illuminates all it surveys, delighting and moving in equal measure.

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

From Notes of Your Music

Petals – a preface

Remember the music we used to play?
The instruments still hang on the wall,
a trellis of brass roses
or an exotic vine with bugle flowers.
Like plumbing but not joined up,
and silent now.
And the lid of the piano is down

The tunes still prickle in my blood,
and though blooming less
each successive year,
have kept a scent of you.
And the truth is
that I have grown older and loved others,
but I shall always carry some notes of your music
in my pockets, like petals,
wherever I go.

1: This Resolution

This resolution to write more, to chase
Away the shadows, comes with fear.
I hope for a kindly, creative space
Where I can heal myself, where I can dare
To think and write again, to cast off
The fractures of the past, or celebrate
Their complex patterns, the tightly woven stuff
Of a lived life, that can chafe and fret.
For it comes with dangers, the possibility
Of a dark alley mugging, the bruised skin
And the traps of a past life that I can’t foresee
That might not free but chain my nightmares in.
But I will try to keep this promise that I give
And explore the life I’ve had, and now live.

 
2:  The promise

The parrot says, "Good morning," from its pen,
The menu is open in front of us
And I am in the world of choice again,
A solace, and all its promises.
If I were a doctor I would harness more
The power of self-prescribing, it brings
A sense of autonomy, of growth, the core
Is stimulated again and my tired heart sings.
It gives my self a chance to recalibrate,
To sift through what I feel and what I know,
Let melancholy in and then what fate
May choose to find for me, to show.
I rattle like buttons in a toffee tin,
I need to sort them. So let me in.

Karen Stevens, "Brilliant Blue"

 

Karen Stevens writes short fiction and has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including The Big Issue, Fish Publishing, Salt Publishing and Valley Press. She was runner-up for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award in 2023. Her edited collection of essays Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her co-edited collection of short stories High Spirits won a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology in 2019. Karen is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and lives in West Sussex. Brilliant Blue is her first collection of short stories.

About Brilliant Blue, by Karen Stevens
Welcome to the infamous Duncock Estate. Nestled on the South English coast, it is a place where identity matters; where people hold down jobs and do their best. Where taboos are broken, adultery is committed, and problems can’t be wished away. But even tragedy can be tinged with fragile hopes and humour.

You can read more about Brilliant Blue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the book. 

 

From Brilliant Blue

Extract from ‘Among the Crows’

It was knocking on four o’clock when Andy decided he’d had enough. There was no end to it: road after road of council houses with verges that he needed to strim. He’d taken his time again; just couldn’t be bothered. A full hour for lunch and several tea breaks, while Maciej – Mac, they’d nicknamed him at work – kept on going. The man was a machine. Intensely efficient.

The heat was doing Andy in; his throat felt scorched. He switched off the strimmer, removed his goggles and ear defenders. The sudden stillness alarmed him. He glanced behind, half expecting a drugged-up maniac to lunge and nick his strimmer. Mac was on the opposite side of the road, further on, heading for the finish line. For health and safety, the council’s rules were that workers must stay in pairs, but it was impossible for Andy to keep up with Mac, and impossible for Mac to slow down.

Andy watched Mac’s automated motion. His biceps were loaves. He swung his arms from left to right, chopping swathes of nettles and grass, getting the job done. No work, no cake, he’d say simply, whenever Andy griped about being sent into the dark heart of the Duncock Estate.

He sat on the verge and took in the council houses, their concrete walls bleached dirty-white from the sun. Objects poked out from the parched grass of a ramshackle garden opposite.

A rusting fridge revealed its mouldy interior. A child the same age as his Cora could fit in there, closing the door to hide, suffocating within minutes. He kept his eye on the fridge and felt relieved that he lived on the outskirts of this sprawling estate, where things were less desperate and hostile.

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, "Cold Toast"

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a Bristol-based writer whose debut collection of flash fiction Cold Toast has recently been published by Dahlia Books. Her work has been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, and elsewhere. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge's Flash Nonfiction competition, Lucent Dreaming’s flash contest, and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash, supported by an Arts Council England DYCP Award. Her author website is here. 

About Cold Toast, by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, this evocative flash fiction collection captures the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.

Set against a backdrop of smoky kitchens, playground politics, and flickering TV sets, these stories trace the quiet rebellions and uneasy compromises of lives shaped by expectation and constraint. Two women discuss an unfaithful husband at the school gates. A father trades his daughter’s first kiss for a fishing trip. A girl becomes convinced the silent calls to her home are from the Yorkshire Ripper.

By turns tender, raw, and defiant, this collection lays bare the tension between freedom and conformity, love and survival, and what it meant to come of age in a world that wasn’t always ready for you.

You can read more about Cold Toast on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample flash fiction from the collection. 

From Cold Toast
Note: this flash fiction, ‘Double Lives,’ appears in Cold Toast and was the winner of Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre’s ‘QuietManDave Prize’ in 2022, and also appears in Fuel: An anthology of prize-winning flash fictions to raise funds for fuel poverty, edited by Tania Hershman. It is written in the form of a breathless sentence.

Double Lives

I see Gwen at the school gates and she does this thing where she’s looking but not seeing and I’m not in the mood so I wave my hands in her face and she says sorry, but she’s still got this unseeing expression and I ask is everything ok? and she says yeah, if finding out your husband’s living with another woman in the arse end of Wales is ok, and I say what, you mean your husband Rhys? and she nods, and says yes, my husband Rhys, and it’s a crazy way for us to be carrying on because she only has one husband, but I’m not getting it, so I say Rhys Rhys? and she says, Rhys Rhys, and I feel a kind of vertigo because it was only last March when I noticed how he’d started hanging back after dropping the kids off, how easy it was to talk to him about all the stuff no one else ever wants to talk about, like how we all create our own prisons and how we’ll bring our kids up to know there are more choices out there, how I was the only mother he spoke to, the only mother whose jokes he laughed at, and how good it felt to crack a crooked smile in the face Gwen always described as being like a slapped backside―and I think they’ve been together since they were fifteen, to be honest, I had thought a lot about that, about getting to your forties and only sleeping with one other person and if Rhys had ever thought about sleeping with other women before―before that first crazy time―and Gwen says she’s going to get a test from the pharmacy because how many other women has he been sleeping with, and I’m like, you think there could have been more? and she shrugs, and I’m getting this weird double vision thing where the canopies on the horse chestnuts in front of us aren’t lined up with the trunks and my left arm starts going numb, and I say, I’m not feeling too good and she says, Rhys told me you got migraines, and says, bye then, so I say, bye then, and watch her go; double-Gwen surrounded by an aura of fucked electrical impulses only I can see.

Ruth Bidgood, "Chosen Poems," with a memoir by Merryn Williams

By Merryn Williams 

I first met Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) when I was a struggling new poet and she was one of the most eminent Welsh poets in English. We shared a love of the "green desert" of mid-Wales – ruined cottages, ever-changing weather, high hills you could ascend into a "cold kingdom of black bog and rock." She had retreated to the tiny village of Abergwesyn, where she lived quietly, after several silent years in the Home Counties and a painful divorce.  

Her language was always plain and clear, what Wordsworth called "the real language of men." Here is a short poem which expresses piercing sorrow through the simplest images:

Elegy for Sarah

Bitter apples load the tree

by a girl’s grave

in a tangle of summer weeds.

Small wet apples glow

through summer rain.

"My days are past"

she cries from her stone,

"my purposes are broken off" –

apple bough broken,

fallen in dripping weeds.

"even the thoughts of my heart."

My thoughts, my purposes, my days

broken among weeds,

and summer rain falling

on wet stone, bitter apples.

That’s exactly how it feels, standing near a crumbling Welsh church in the rain thinking of the lives that have ended. She was interested in exploring, not so much the hilly country itself, as landscapes of the mind:

Acquaintance

It was from a border county of my life

you crossed into another country, 

having never settled. Smoke rose one dawn

from the overnight house for which

your thrown stone transitorily defined

a patch of my waste land; but soon

the hut was derelict. Acquaintance ending

seems not to warrant uneasier weather

than a fraction of wind-change brings;

yet over my moors the sky sags now,

black with irrational certainty

of departures. From your hasty thatch

rushes loosen, blow east. The heartland may be next

to know depopulation.

A relationship which never became a close friendship is described through images of the sparsely populated land around Abergwesyn. And next thing you know, her family is about to break up.

 Ruth immersed herself in local history and wrote wonderful poems about obscure and vanished people - servants, small farmers, a man who emigrates to Australia and a man who doesn’t ("Emu’s Egg"). She wrote too about the great subjects of darkness and light ("Driving through 95% Eclipse"), about the threats to, and from nature ("Slate Quarry, Penceulan"), and restrainedly about her deep love for a man who died ("Voyage"). She never talked much about herself, so after her death and with the permission of her children, I explored her previous life as a girl in Port Talbot (where Richard Burton was a schoolmate), a Wren in wartime and a 1950s housewife. The poetry came late, coinciding with her move back to Wales, and although she went on writing well into her nineties the great poems belong to the Abergwesyn years. It turned out that this little patch of earth yielded an inexhaustible subject, and I find myself re-reading her poems constantly and with growing admiration.

You can read more about Chosen Poems by Ruth Bidgood, with a memoir by Merryn Williams, here. 

Book Review Competition 2025: The Results

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing ran a book review competition. The competition was open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. You can read more about it here. 

The standard of entries was very high indeed - every entry we received was professional, well-written and eminently publishable. Results of the competition are below. First prize is £100 in gift vouchers. There are also two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers, plus three "Honourable Mentions." All winning entries will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next week or so. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Results

1st Prize: Lee Wright, for his review of On Agoraphobia, by Graham Caveney

Runner-Up: Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, for her review of The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

Runner-Up: Iain Minney, for his review of The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

Honourable Mention: Wiktoria Borkowska, for her review of I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Honourable Mention: Kathy Hoyle, for her review of Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers

Honourable Mention: Kimaya Patil, for her review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

D. A. Prince, "Continuous Present"

  

Since 2008, D. A. Prince has published three collections with HappenStance Press. The second, Common Ground, won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. The third, The Bigger Picture (2022), includes ‘The Window,’ Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes anthology for 2020. Her poems have also made less conventional appearances: as bookmarks, on posters on the Longbenton Metro station in Newcastle, and even handwritten, on biscuit wrappers as part of the Wrapper Rhymes installation at StAnza in 2020. Prince reviews contemporary poetry for London Grip, The Friday Poem and Orbis among other literary magazines. 

Prince's new pamphlet, Continuous Present, is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

About Continuous Present, by D. A. Prince
Is there such a thing as an ‘average moment’? If so, what might it contain? The varied immediacy of the natural world, perhaps, richly green; a conversation on a suburban bus or at the hairdresser; or the monotony of the M1 in heavy traffic, where the relentless pressure from heavy lorries and their mission statements – Driven by Perfection, Optimal Solutions, Your Tomorrow Delivered Today – tower over you and your small car. While the continuity of time brings the past close to the present, just out of sight there are other worlds: the what-ifs, parallel lives and choices you might have made. These poems explore the textures of routine experience but also glimpse alternative dimensions within and beyond our daily lives.

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

From Continuous Present

I’d Got My Notebook Out

but the man by the window untangling his hearing aids
explains how the batteries stick — no, not rechargeable —
and, when the bus bounces, that the drain covers
need resetting, how it’s easier with tarmac
unlike the Chinese granite — this City Council,
that Mayor they’ve got — and he and his brother
(both into archaeology) complained —
but do they listen? Then he’s back to the cellar,
his aunt’s house, demolished now —
but you know that bar, that Belgian one —
and when the gas was put in
they found a hole, could see three arches
with those Roman bricks, and a wall,
but were the Council interested? And now
it’s all gone, but what’s beneath, buried:
who knows? Gets off at the museum
(two developers gone bust, the deadlined posters
eaten by the rain) and pavement, asphalt, tarmac
aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.

Cézanne at Tate Modern

Too many apples says my friend, dismissing
Cézanne and his stubborn brush working
the canvas over and over, trying
to uncover truth or whatever
lies under the skin. His apple-flesh grows solid
but never solid enough for him:
he’s weighing their presence, finding that they lack
what his brush won’t give. Perhaps it’s the light
falling too thin on them, too forgiving
of failure. Perhaps he can’t forgive himself,
his hand closing too tight. Perhaps
one more time will get it right, then one more time.
He can’t have too many apples. None
is perfect but it’s no longer apples that matter,
only how in the alchemy of oil and canvas
and his brush they become apples.
Obstinate, indestructible, wrote Rilke
after Cézanne’s death. Now they hang here
framed and untouchable, still challenging
the ticketed crowd nodding past,
familiar with the surface blur of apples
— Too many apples — red, green, why so many? —
not seeing each apple testing itself
against the previously unpaintable air,
the brush coming to terms with the press of paint
against weave and hand and eye.
We can’t have too many apples.

Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees"

 

Meg Pokrass is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. She is a two-time winner of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International. It has also been included in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Rattle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, New England Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator and co-founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding / managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Inverness, Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.

About Old Girls and Palm Trees, by Meg Pokrass, illustrated by Cooper Renner
Old Girls and Palm Trees is an illustrated collection about iconoclasts, perpetual dreamers, tightrope walkers, living room magicians, cat lovers, and female friendship. The "old girls" in these linked hybrid pieces are women of a certain age who, in an alternate reality, refuse to accept the stereotypes of aging. The collection is conjured from dreamscapes of what just may be true. The poems, prose poems and micros in this collection invite us into an alternate reality where joy and love for same sex friends become a magical force to be reckoned with.  

You can read more about Old Girls and Palm Trees on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read five sample pieces from the collection. 

From Old Girls and Palm Trees

Rosy 

 

Late August we adopt a cat. The house brightens up. We name her after the pinkish-red clouds hanging around like half-eaten cotton candy. Rosy is a kisser, jumping on my desk, sniffing my lips. Twirling around in the living room chasing her tail. 

"Did you know that a scattering of wavelengths and blue light in the sky could be so lovely?" she says as the sky turns even more rosy than the night before.

Plunking Away on the Sofa 

 

It trickles down from my scalp as if it doesn’t know where to go or how to stop going there. "Stop moping about your mop," the old girl says. She smiles at me as if I’m perfectly imperfect and sits with the rosy cat while I plunk away on my ukulele, singing "When the Saints Come Marching In" to an audience of whiskers. 

"All we need now is a New Orleans funeral," she laughs, her arms around the cat—the three of us floating away to the islands.

Grand Entrances

 

At the Japanese lantern festival, the old girl and I hip-bump in, psyched about whatever people think of us, two zaps of purple in the crazy shuffle, licking wasabi from our lips, ignoring our hair, unpedicured, unmanicured, candid with hard-earned frumpiness. "You are my badge of honor," she says, holding my fingers. "You are my lantern in the wind."

Collector of Days

 

Late August, the dampness eased. We watched a squirrel collect nuts and take them back to her nest. I told the old girl, It’s almost September, you’re still here. She smiled. Where else? At the pond in the woods, we cast our fingers into the water, felt the cold sting. At the end of each dripping day we swung on the porch, kissing the rims of our wine glasses.  

 

Lewis Buxton, "Mate Arias"

Lewis Buxton, photo by Rosie A Mills-Smith

Lewis Buxton won the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2020 and has a full-length collection out with Nine Arches Press. He regularly visits schools, delivering workshops and performances to young people, and his theatre shows tour extensively in the UK. He lives in Norfolk.

About Mate Arias, by Lewis Buxton
Mate Arias is Lewis Buxton’s love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.

Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.

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

Working Out 

We lift until our arms are dead rabbits: 

he would prefer we were sat in awkward 

positions, dumbbells slung across our hips 

thrusting upwards, rather than find a word 

for what we are to each other: Mate? Friend? 

Buddy? Pal? Brother? I don’t even know. 

Now we are fit shadows trying to bend 

our bodies into shape. I wouldn’t go 

if you didn’t come with me, Alex says 

as we knacker ourselves on the treadmills, 

horses eating air, speaking through spittle. 

I often turn up alone but most days 

that feels thick and forlorn. It’s nice you’re here 

mate, friend, buddy, pal, brother, whatever.

Book Review Competition 2025: Call for Entries!

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing are running a book review competition. 

The competition is open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. First prize is £100 in Amazon gift vouchers. There will also be two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers. All entries will be considered for publication on the website. 

All you have to do is write a short book review (200-400 words) of a book you’ve read recently and enjoyed. The review should be positive overall. The book you choose doesn’t have to be new: it can be any work of fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry from any time, by any author. Please include a short (2-line) biography of yourself at the end of the review. 

Please send your entries (no more than one per student) to this email address: everybodysreviewing@gmail.com. You can also use the same email address for any queries you have about the competition. 

The deadline for submissions is 9am on Monday 23 June 2025. 

David Morley, "Passion"

 

David Morley, photo by Graeme Oxby

David Morley’s last book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. 

About Passion, by David Morley 
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature’s Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers,’ pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters.’ There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet’s authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

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

From Passion

Dialect

Evening froze to a night nailed with stars.
I watched a birdbox fill with flying words
fleeing the chill by bundling in on each other.

I took the box from its hook and prised its lid
and shook the lives of language out of it
festooning my table with wings and feathers,
writhing, fluttering, like a bird made of birds:

Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, 
Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, 
Feather Poke, Hedge Jug, Prinpriddle,
Ragamuffin, Billy-featherpoke, Puddneypoke,
Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, 
Long Pod, Bush Oven, and Miller’s Thumb.

I tucked them in this box before they woke.

We Make Manx Shearwaters Vomit Bottlecaps

‘Here is what a stomach full of plastic
looks like’, says the bird reserve warden. 
‘You can see it stretched so much that the shapes 
of plastic are visible. When I say we make 
shearwaters vomit bottle caps I’m not exaggerating.’ 
He twists the dead Manxie on its back, 
snipping the sac open. His forceps fossick 
into the dissected bird. Rubbish piles up 
by the body. I try to focus on the wing feathers.

Eye-bright and gliding over wave crests
the shearwater rides on updraught and jetstream. 
A placid sea is her unploughed field.
The bird bends on the blade of storm to turn 
the seabed over, drive deep swells to the surface.
The wind swings north, the moon’s gravity 
tilts the sea-surge. For phytoplankton this
is everything life needs, and they flicker 
and breed in that frenzy of crosscurrents
the fish following the glut of plankton
dumped on the surface like data 
from the dark. The shearwater’s compass 
stills, she stabs straight into the undertow 
where her fish-prey spiral in their bait-ball
like an underwater galaxy, a million stars 
spawning in a nebula of bioluminescence.

The warden stares up at me: ‘Don’t look away.’
  
This is what a poem full of plastic looks like.

Judith Allnatt, "The Poet's Wife"

Judith Allnatt writes novels, poetry and short stories. Her most recently published novel, The Poet’s Wife, was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award. Her first novel, A Mile of River, was featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month and shortlisted for the Portico Prize. Short stories have featured in the Bridport Prize Anthology, the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Awards and on BBC Radio 4. Judith lectures widely and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her website is here. 

About The Poet's Wife, by Judith Allnatt
Inspired by the letters written by the poet John Clare from the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, The Poet’s Wife gives a voice to Patty Clare as she faces John’s deluded belief that he is married to Mary Joyce, his childhood sweetheart, whom Patty can never hope to rival. 

Patty loves John deeply, but he seems lost to her. Plagued by jealousy, she seeks strength in memories: their whirlwind courtship, the poems John wrote for her, their shared affinity for the land. But as John descends further into delusion, she struggles to conquer her own anger and hurt, and reconcile with the man she now barely knows.

You can read more about The Poet’s Wife here. You can read an interview with the author by Adèle Geras here. Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From The Poet’s Wife
After four years away, I found my husband sitting by the side of the road, picking gravel from his shoe and with his foot bloody from long walking. His clothes were crumpled from nights spent in the hedge or goodness knows where, and he had an old wide-awake hat on the back of his head like a gypsy.

"John," I said. "Are you coming home?"

When he heard his name he looked up at me, as if curious that I knew it, then held out his shoe to me as if to show me its parlous state: its sole loose and hanging from the upper. I bent and put it back upon his foot as gently as I could, for his stocking was brown with blood from many blisters. He watched my face with a look of puzzlement and when I stood and reached out my hand to help him up he refused it, levered himself up by his own efforts and began to walk away. His short figure and limping gait were so pitiful as he set off again along the empty road that my heart followed straight after him.

I turned back to Mr. Ward and Charles who were waiting in the cart, but they looked as nonplussed as I. Not wishing to lose him again, I followed down the road calling "John! Wait!" and when I reached him I caught his hands fast in mine. 

He pulled them away as if I had burned him saying "Are you drunk, woman? Leave me be!" and continued to shuffle along with his shoulders set as if he had been mortally offended.

Matthew James Jones, "Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures"

Matthew James Jones is a poet, novelist, storyteller and veteran who wrote the best-selling novel Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures. Today, Matt writes and teaches in Paris: Leadership at the École Militaire and Creative Writing at SciencesPo. His many published works interrogate themes of dehumanization, poetics, monsters, masculinity, cross-cultural exchange, and healing. He also co-hosts the by-donation Write Time workshop, and organizes fitness enthusiasts who use trees as barbells: the Log Club. 

About Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures, by Matthew James Jones
Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures tracks Jones, a drone operator stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2010. As he monitors Sahar, a teenager and suspected terrorist, Jones commits the ultimate crime: he cares. 

Jones’s supervisor is similarly stained, a fierce soldier who champions Afghan women. By day, Jones and the Major track Taliban down the cratered highways. By night, they wish their love had never hurt so many. 

Beneath the base, Jones befriends Noah who, despite his cruel fangs and horrifying strength, is the only gentle creature in the entire desert. As Jones contends with a brutal predator stalking soldiers, Noah’s bids for freedom grow desperate, and the fighting season renews with a fresh crop of Taliban. 

In Kandahar, there’s a monster in every window. And there’s also one in every mirror. As the war grinds him to ever-finer particles, Jones grapples with the toll—madness, craters, grief.

From Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures

Predator

I was so used to looking through them, but never at them. On the other side of a fence, the drone idled on the tarmac in front of a bunker. It stood as tall as I did. Shark-like, with two pectoral fins that extended from its sides like a traditional plane. Yet the stabilizing fins at the tail pointed down in an inverse "V." Grey. Grey with white patches: a camouflage of cloud. The most disconcerting thing was its eyelessness. Easy to imagine planes with cockpits and windows and WWII pilots mummified in looping scarves. Not these flying robots, piloted by science and logic. The drone seemed to have a face, but without eyes, it was blank, expressionless. Instead, it "saw" through hypersensitive nodes on the back of its neck, and chin. Drones have no agency; they obey the voices in their heads, clutching close their clusters of bombs: four in each armpit. This type of drone was the Predator, little brother of Reaper. I met its unblinking gaze for a moment. Truly it was a predator, as unfeeling as they wanted us to be. Its job was to hide in clouds or the glare of the sun. To lurk behind bunkers with a Taser. When Predator was a child he was never invited to picnics. His hands were full of missiles that he thought were flowers. He was a strange boy, too quiet. Always muttering to himself and wanting to be older so his bombs would drop. Always rubbing his node on the legs of teachers. No one wants to be your friend, Predator. The only thing you know how to do is assassinate people. You think, because you’re unmanned, you can cross borders and kill in other lands, and no one will think that is war. You’re on the wrong side of history. You could be so noble, flying into radioactive areas, dumping water on thirsty crops, detonating yourself in the eyes of sharknados. But you were seized early, by powerful men, and made a weapon, same as the rest of us.