Wendy Allen, "Portrait in Mustard"

 

Wendy Allen’s debut pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird, was published in 2023 by Broken Sleep. She has collaborated with Dr Charley Barnes on the hybrid collection, freebleeding (Broken Sleep, 2024), a poetic consideration of the political act of Free Bleeding, shown through letters, poems and prose. Also published in 2024, Wendy collaborated with Galia Admoni on i get lost everywhere, you know this now, published by Salo. Wendy’s pamphlet, Portrait in Mustard, was published in October 2024 by Seren. She is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at MMU.  

About Portrait in Mustard, by Wendy Allen
Wendy Allen’s Portrait in Mustard celebrates sex and pleasure, whilst registering the risks of intimacy for straight women in a world where men’s pleasure often comes first. Via the unabashed tones of mustard yellow and metaphors of fruit and art, Allen’s poems create a manifesto for women’s independence, autonomy and joy. These are explicit, honest poems which embrace sex as an integral part of relationships and love. 

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

From Portrait in Mustard

Rachael Clyne, "You'll Never Be Anyone Else"

Rachael Clyne, from Glastonbury, is widely published in journals and anthologies. Now retired, Rachael was a professional actor in her youth, appearing in TV dramas and series including Coronation St. She also worked in theatre and in the 70s, briefly joined the Sadista Sisters female rock cabaret. She also played the lead in Victoria Wood’s first play, Talent. This has fed into her enjoyment for live readings of her poetry. She later trained and worked for over 30 years as a psychotherapist, practicing in various settings and running counselling trainings. She has published two self-help books, for cancer patients and on self-esteem issues, and co-founded one of the first cancer support resources in London.

It is only in later life that she began to seriously develop her poetry. Her prizewinning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree (Indigo Dreams, 2014), concerns our lost connection with nature. Her pamphlet, Girl Golem (4word.org, 2018) explores her Jewish migrant heritage. This new collection, You’ll Never Be Anyone Else, was published by Seren in 2023.

About You'll Never Be Anyone Else
You’ll Never Be Anyone Else reflects the poet’s journey of coming to terms with her sense of otherness. Her alter-ego Girl Golem, based on the legendary man made from clay to protect Jewish people from persecution, appears at several points in the book. Rachael explores her Jewish and LGBTQ+ identity, which she says felt like a double whammy during the era in which she grew up. She surveys attitudes both past and present. This collection joins a chorus of poetic voices who challenge us with their difference and touch our shared humanity. Rachael uses a variety of forms to explore migrant heritage, sexual orientation, relationships, domestic violence and ageing. Her work is peppered with quirky imagery and humour, even in its darkest corners. The poem, "Jew-a-lingo – Codeswitching for Jews," takes the form of a lesson in how minority groups behave within their culture, then self-censor in the outside world. The book presents a distinctive voice from someone who has learned self-acceptance and as a therapist has used that knowledge to help others do similar.

You can read more about You'll Never Ben Anyone Else on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From You'll Never Be Anyone Else, by Rachael Clyne

Three Piece Suite

Mother, the rickety chair, teeters; 
needs a wedge to steady her. 
A chair from the Old Country, 
carried on backs, luggage racks, smuggled

across borders. Father, a wooden 
ironing board, hides in the understairs 
cupboard, lost in the hiss of his steam-iron, 
whistle of hearing aids and bash of his klomper.

Grandma, the leathery pouffe, smells 
of olives, lemon tea and shit on shaky fingers. 
Between chair, ironing board and pouffe, 
I, their tailor’s cushion, bristle with pins.


Girl Golem

The night they blew life into her, she clung 
bat-like to the womb-wall. A girl golem, 
a late bonus, before the final egg dropped. 
She divided, multiplied, her hand-buds bloomed.
her tail vanished into its coccyx and the lub-dub 
of her existence was bigger than her nascent head.

 
She was made as a keep-watch, in case 
new nasties tried to take them away. 
The family called her tchotchkele, their little cnadle,  
said she helped to make up for lost numbers –
as if she could compensate for millions. 

With x-ray eyes, she saw she was trapped 
in a home for the deaf and blind, watched them 
blunder into each other’s neuroses. Her task, 
to hold up their world, be their assimilation ticket, 
find a nice boy and mazel tov – grandchildren!

But she was a hotchpotch golem, schmutter garment 
that would never fit, trying to find answers 
without a handbook. When she turned eighteen, 
she walked away, went in search of her own kind, 
tore their god from her mouth. 


Golem: man made from clay and Kabbalistic spells, by rabbis to protect Jews from persecution. Truth: אֶמֶת was written on his forehead and God’s name on his tongue. Tchotchkele (diminutive of tchotchke): a trinket, a cute child. Mazel tov: good luck. Cnadle: a dumpling. Schmutter: a rag. 

Unfitting

           After Caroline Bird

Like a glove on the wrong hand, 
the moon out at noon. I was salt in tea,
shoving my leg into a sleeve,
stuck on the singles table at weddings,                                                   
stifling the crush on my best friend,  
calling my partner they, or trying 
to book a double room in a B&B.

How I distanced myself from those women
in the bar on the Kings Road, 
where some wore cufflinks, others, 
heavy perfume, tight dresses. 
I couldn’t bear a skirt, without 
the safety of a gusset.

The chips from my shoulders make 
a magnificent outfit: gloved, salty 
and stitched with gold. 

You’ll never be anyone else

so you – yes you, with your warts and wings 
will just have to do.
 
Acceptance is your food and shelter, without which 
you are brushwood

left to the mercy of any foul wind. 
Stop drinking the poison 

labelled Hate me. It’s that simple.
I didn’t say easy.

Carrie Etter, "Grief's Alphabet"

 

Carrie Etter, photo by Fabrizia Costa

Grief’s Alphabet is Carrie Etter’s fifth collection of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals and anthologies internationally. She is a member of the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Bristol, and she also writes fiction, essays, and reviews. Her website is here. 

About Grief's Alphabet

Grief’s Alphabet is a memoir in poems of the poet’s relationship with her adoptive mother up to her unexpected death and the long work of mourning. The book might also be described as a book-length elegy, trying to articulate the magnitude of this loss.

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

From Grief's Alphabet, by Carrie Etter

Why I Didn’t Save One of Her Lighthouses for Myself

          In May 2022, the Queenscliff Maritime Museum held a competition for

          a collective noun for lighthouses.

At last I faced her lighthouses, the smallest the size of my thumb.

In dozens on shelves either side of the TV. 

Which Christmas did Nancy and I give her lighthouse calendars?

I could not find one to represent the whole.

All those portals for she who. 

A relief of lighthouses.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke, "We Have to Leave the Earth"

 

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is an award-winning author of poems and novels for adults, published in 23 languages. Her first poetry collection, Inroads, won the Tyrone Guthrie Prize, an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, a Northern Promise Award, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Prize. Currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, she also writes gothic suspense novels as CJ Cooke, including The Nesting and The Lighthouse Witches. Her website is here.

About We Have to Leave the Earth, by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s new poetry collection is both keenly political and deeply personal. The opening poem ‘now’ features a seemingly peaceful domestic scene of a family lounging at home as the starting point for meditation on history, time, mortality and the fate of the planet. Jess-Cooke is unafraid of dark material but is also ultimately hopeful and full of creative strategies to meet challenging times. 

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

From We Have to Leave the Earth

We Have to Leave the Earth Because We Know So Much

He buried the letter in a forest near Auschwitz
where it hibernated for forty winters,
ampersands of his hand dormant 
as field mice, and for all        he knew
the letter would never be found, snows
might drink the ink or the ground 
swallow it as a grave. But
             the urge to bear
witness moved him past consequence 
of being found to speak of what he said
to those he led to the gas chambers – 
that they were not here to be bathed 
as they’d                 been told.
       We are still in that place, 
being moved past consequence or to death, or 
to witness the taking of what is not owed.
We have not passed the urge to obliterate
the Other. We have to leave the earth
because we know too many ways to destroy
her, we have to write these things
we have to tell them to the forest 
and the watchful snows.

Kim Moore, "All the Men I Never Married"

Kim Moore’s pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. Her first collection The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second collection All The Men I Never Married was published by Seren in 2021. Her first non-fiction book What The Trumpet Taught Me will be published by Smith/Doorstop in March 2022. Kim is originally from Leicester. Her website is here. 

About All the Men I Never Married

This eagerly awaited second collection of poems from Kim Moore is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.

From All the Men I Never Married, by Kim Moore

No. 32.

You lived there for a week, in a country
you will not give a name to, not because 
of what happened there, but because
you do not want this story to be changed
into a story of a country, you want it to be
the story of a man, or one-night-of-a-man, 
a story of a hotel, or maybe the story of a lift,
the faded carpet, mirrors on every wall, 
and his insistence, standing too close 
and smiling, both of you pretending 
you’re good friends, maybe this is the story 
of the corridor, how he asked you 
where your room was, and you, stupid,
stupid, said down there and even pointed
and maybe this translated to follow me
to the room with birds fluttering behind 
the walls, the room with birds living 
between the walls, the room of curtains, 
heavy, floor-length, blocking all the light, 
the corners where nobody cleaned, 
dust and the dead battery of a wasp, 
you said my room is down there and then
kept walking, put your key in the lock 
and he was right behind you, you felt
his breath on your neck so you turned
and put your hand on his chest
which may have looked like an invitation
except you were pushing, pushing him back,
who knows if you said no or if you said
I want to go to sleep or if you said both
but when you backed through the door
and slammed it closed, you remember it felt rude 
to shut a door like that, so close to his face,
your heart beating in your chest
as if you’d been running very fast,
you remember thinking you were lucky,
luck got you out of it again, you sank
to your knees in the room of the birds,
you told yourself it was nothing 
though it felt like something very bad
had almost happened, you swore
this would never happen to you 
in silence and stillness again.

Naomi Krüger, "May"

 

Naomi Krüger is a writer and academic based in Lancashire. Her short fiction has been commissioned by Lancaster Litfest, commended in Aesthetica and published in various literary journals. Her debut novel May was published in 2018 by Seren. It was highly commended in the Yeovil Prize, longlisted in the Not the Booker Prize and described by Wales Art Review as ‘a rewarding read: an ambitious novel that speaks to our times.’ Naomi has an MA and PhD from Lancaster University and lectures in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire. Her website is here. You can read a review of May on Everybody's Reviewing here.

About May

The door to the past has been locked to May but fragments of memories still remain: a boy running on the green, his fiery hair, a letter without a stamp, a secret she promised not to tell. She can’t piece together the past or even make sense of the present, but she revisits what she knows again and again. The boy, the letter, the secret. She can’t grasp what they mean, but maybe the people she’s loved and lost can uncover the mystery of the red-headed boy and his connection to May.

Like memories, the book moves through the decades, weaving together the lives of May’s family and Afsana, the woman who cares for her at the nursing home. Their recollections are linked by feelings of doubt, remorse and a sense that they are mourning the paths their lives could have taken. Aftershocks from the past reverberate in the present.

You can read an excerpt from Afsana’s perspective below.

From May

The newsreader is wearing too much make up. It makes her look old. Her hair is as stiff as a helmet. She re-caps the main stories. I’ll feel bad later. I’ll have to make it up to him. I’ll tell him I know I’m selfish. I’ll tell him I’m trying to change. Push the bowl away and think about May. I can’t help it. The images come whether I want them to or not, driving out the pictures of water rushing through shop doorways and people – ordinary people – climbing onto the roofs to get away. Her obsession with the boy starting again. Getting worse because of my stupidity. The enchanted boy. The boy who runs into the trees. He came to the back door once, she said, with nothing on. Not a stitch. And there was frost on the ground. His little toes must have been turning to ice. He was jumping up and down on the spot. Wouldn’t even stay still long enough for them to wrap him in a blanket. 

But there’s nothing at all about him in her memory book. No photos, no records. Only a daughter and never any siblings of her own. Then again, if Dadi ever ended up in a place like that I might not be in her memory book either. It would be easier that way. Better not to exist than to be such a disappointment. 

The sound of Ewan moving around next door. I tiptoe to the bookcase and crouch down to look in the bottom shelf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Baba had one too, a different edition and not so concise. He kept it high in his office so we had to ask him to get it down when we needed it for homework. I pray the word is spelt how it sounds. Gill mentioned it so casually, as though it was a normal part of conversation. There’s new research, she said, that suggests that sometimes the best way to keep them happy is just to play along. The pages are thin like scripture. The words so tiny they move and blend. I run my finger down the list and find it between confab and confect. Confabulate. Con. Fab. U. Late. Imaginary experiences as compensation for memory loss. Maybe Ewan’s right. I’m just wasting my time on things that don’t matter. The boy’s not coming. It’s all fantasy. Most likely he never existed at all. 

Congratulations to Jane Simmons!

Congratulations to Jane Simmons, poet and PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, whose poem "Nativity" has just won the Seren Christmas Poetry Competition 2020. You can read her poem on Seren's blog here. 

Jane Simmons is a former teacher/lecturer who completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. She is now a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester, where her research project is The Poetics and Politics of Motherhood, a practice-led exploration of motherhood through an environmental and political lens, engaging with the theme creatively and as it is treated in contemporary women’s poetry. As a reviewer for The Blue Nib literary magazine, Jane has built a significant publication history of writing about contemporary women’s poetry. A small selection of her own poems appeared in the March 2019 edition of the magazine. Her collection From Darkness into Light – poems inspired by the Book of Kells – was published in 2018. Further poems appeared in the anthology The View from the Steep. She has work forthcoming in Ink, Sweat & Tears. Jane regularly reads and performs her work in the Lincoln area. She won the G. S. Fraser Prize for Poetry in both 2019 and 2020; you can read her winning poems here and here. She recently gave a guest lecture and reading at Leicester University, on the first-year undergraduate module "Introduction to Writing Creatively."