Nuala O'Connor, "Menagerie"

Nuala O'Connor, photo by Úna O'Connor

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published, anthologised, and won many literary awards. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in late March 2025. Her website is here. 

About Menagerie, by Nuala O'Connor
Menagerie is Nuala’s fifth poetry collection, and her first since 2011. It is a book that centres on casting a compassionate, language-loving eye on the animal world, on neurodivergence, on writing, on marriage and familial love, and on art and politics. Carl Phillips, writing in the Irish Times said Menagerie has ‘a warm feelingful generosity of vision and a distant, diagnostic eye … a collection which is at once involving and clear-sighted.’

From Menagerie

Plum

         

          A poem can’t take the place of a plum. 

- Sylvia Plath

Your glaucous bloom is easily wiped away,
one thumb stroke and you are ruby-skinned again,
a firm bed for lips to wrap around.

But you are a frightening prospect;
your skin might make teeth ache, your flesh
may pull a stripe of bitterness over my tongue.

Still, I am willing to plunge in.
I take you in my mouth,
for better, for worse.


Psychopomp

Desire stretches, elongates, it is cat-paw dogged
and I give in, allow my fingers to scroll and tap.
I want more basalt and gold, seed-pearl and jet,
more hair wefted through its own warp, the strands
of the inscrutable dead, snapped behind back-glass.

My treasure box is a tomb of sepia strangers
but I dreamt my mournful trinkets were stolen,
all gone, those turquoise and vulcanite sarcophagi
meant for lapels and bosom-nesting chains –
grim thieves mocked and saw me off, empty-handed.

So here I am again, haunting online marketplaces,
a banshee keening unknowable but felt losses,
a reaper in search of fresh souls to stack,
in order to stuff my communal vault,
with memento mori, with memento vivere.

Ken Evans, "To An Occupier Burning Holes"

Ken Evans’s poems appear in Poetry Scotland, Magma, Under the Radar, Envoi, 14, The High Window, and IS&T. He won the Leeds Peace Prize in 2019; the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition (2018); and Battered Moons (2016). He has twice been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition (2015 and 2020). His second collection, To An Occupier Burning Holes, was launched by Salt in October. 

About To An Occupier Burning Holes, by Ken Evans

The poems in To An Occupier Burning Holes observe and dissect the minutiae of ordinary relationships and happenings, ranging across daily life, as well as attempting to tackle a larger canvas, of contemporary climate collapse, plagues and war. There’s an interest in historical incident as a comparator, attempting to ‘fix’ and focus a current event or idea in a longer-range view and context.

At times, they play and twist form (there are sonnets, a ghazal, a villanelle) as well as try to update styles largely out of vogue – there’s an eclogue and invocation, for example.

The tone is restless - often dark, surreal, absurd, and sardonic, as well as playful, metaphoric and sometimes downright funny, tackling topics as diverse as lost hearing-aids, AI, funeral invoices, the life of fruit flies, migration, bins, love, family and travel.

You can see more details about To An Occupier Burning Holes on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three sample poems from the collection. 

From To An Occupier Burning Holes

To an Occupier Burning Holes

Orders to bring our middle names to the Square
on a scrap of paper and throw it on their bonfire:

a ritual purge, our lives crumpled, shorn
in a black smoke of scribble.

A middle name is a second language, a suit
dressed in plastic at the back of a wardrobe,

for weddings and funerals, yet I loathe mine
and am teased for it, so throw it to the fire

without shame, but for others, their names
came down from patriachs, or else starchy

from mothers, family history. Which is the point,
of course. Erasure of ties with the past, but not so

we are made blank, more a reminder of what we
lack, what the regime will provide – revisions.

Those without second names make one up, to leave
scarves up a sleeve, a white rabbit, in hiding. Some

hitch it to their last: Celeste-Smith; Anna-Evans; Andriy-
Brown, Sasha Roberts, the hyphen, a knife cut through

a fraction, divided, yet double-barrelled, twice 
as strong. Others hide it in their first: Bodhan becomes

Bo, Viktoria, Vika – their cut-out centres worn on the out-
side like a smile, with two fingers up, at lapel height.


Bacchanale

The invader sends wine to sweeten us,
our fighters in a street in green fatigues. 

They wave and stagger till they fall over, 
red wine pouring from their throats.

Our defenders offer to match an invaders’
rounds, but they refuse, ‘No, this is on us,

drink up. You’re welcome.’ In hospital, 
drunk songs yell from booze-sodden beds.

The invaders largesse knows no bounds: 
fiery vodka, cognac, brandy, Jäger bombs. 

Women jig crazily by open crater-holes, 
children bewildering in the red spills. 

A few appear in a blaze of fancy-dress,
crimson mask for a face, unrecognisable,

fleshy accessories worn on the outside 
like big silver fish burst forth from nets.

One group, all crashed out, smoke  
in the venue. This is not permissable.

No, children should not be given drink,
they chuck it everywhere, singed carpets,

glassy family photos, on the door handles
of blown-out of entrances, too off-their-face

to answer their phones, our emojis calling,
frantic, ‘Kristina, I have aspirin, I have water.’


Anaesthetising Flies in the Lab

Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly

in their glass dungeon, music, sweet and sad, 
can help these young babies with folded wings 
like swaddling bands, settle to their exoskeletons, 
and lull them toward the entrancement of sleep.

You have a god-like half-hour in the fly nursery 
as they rest, for they rise quickly on feeling warm,
and like all newborns, wake hungry for nipagin-
ethanol solution and bio-agar, plus a little water.

Pull the front legs off as they sleep to see 
how they preen. They are spotless, contrary 
to expectation, and polish each body part 
in order, the eyes, antennae, then head. 

Front legs torn off, they adapt in forty-eight hours, 
or eight years in human life and start to clean 
with their middle legs. This learning, beyond all 
my easy metaphor.

Kelli Allen, "Leaving the Skin on the Bear"

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal. She is an award-wining poet, editor, and dancer. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and she is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her collections include Otherwise, Soft White Ash (John Gosslee Books 2012), Imagine Not Drowning (C&R Press 2017), Banjo’s Inside Coyote (C&R Press 2019). Allen’s latest book is Leaving the Skin on the Bear, published by C&R Press, 2022. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. 

Kelli's website is here.

 

About Leaving the Skin on the Bear

Part soft underbelly, part scabrous self-reflection, Leaving the Skin on the Bear is a collection that takes readers on a sojourn through the richly imagined weaving of a world that is both our own and not. The poems collected here celebrate otherness and contradiction, demand understanding and the acceptance of not-knowing simultaneously. These poems stay the crooked path and reimagine what it is, and has always been, to learn that no loss is complete. The untamed imageries summoned here leap from one form to another in their need to meet the demands of what becomes a steady inquiry. This is not a collection of answers, but a testimony of what a life lived in questions might look like. In these pages we are, perhaps above all else, brought nearer to knowing the vanity of containing, and of what we bury. Living is a cycle of unearthings. This collection’s recurring potsherd cuts despair into our certainty, and its cost, towards the world. These pieces suggest that turning away from what wounds is the forgetting that strips a crucial magic: the capacity to marvel at feeling.

From Leaving the Skin on the Bear, by Kelli Allen

A thief, a nakedness, a boat far from shore

My legs are apart, twin otters 
sharing a stone between them.
No longer on the windowsill 
of my mother’s womb, this body
is not her body. The minnows 
we vomit we swallow back down—
These slithering selves too much 
under water. Once upon a time
Everything ends—the village, 
the woodcutting, the orphans’ 
hunger, and their fullness, too. 


Here is the world she plays:

Hornbill shadows through the threads in her socks and the whole of the lake bundled tight in her belly. Another morning for the girl, another hour watching across shore for her brother’s yellow boat. She reminds herself, in this waiting, that what the woodcutter splits is glued over severance when such waters seep wounded skin. This, too, is a duty between daughters and fathers: tending to broken roots before rot’s appetite bores holes more than well-deep. 

During the month of long nights, a gecko gives its life to the disagreement of two crows. But the girl wraps one thin leg around the other and the nest constructed is no refuge for anything tailed and hungry. It is nearing evening and stretched-out over rabbits, pelts sticky as evaporating nut milk, the mother does not allow agates, cock-shaped and orange-lined, time to speak. The girl listens to the same incantation, the same rhythm, and wishes her mother quiet, just once, just to let locusts sing the dinner dirge. The mother’s voice climbs over teeth and tongue anyway: what the stones say, the river says, too. This is not poetry for children too many years still ear-wet from the womb. 

When the three share a table between them, having agreed to masticate slow, thirty molar thrusts downward each, other breathing creatures align in the way of pilgrims in those woods. Circles form in any space suggested to them—even the catfish looking for warmth curl into one another at the suggestion of a waiting meal. Snails leave gelatin before daylight that the mother weaves into eleven arrow pierced cakes. The father tries not to swallow sand while his daughter’s hair collects the baked fletch as she eats, her bites light as an earthworm’s lung.
The caution of lilacs dictates a family’s scaffold atop grief. Mouths in triplicate give thanks as the mudwork dries and the false gratitude marks success on another floor lain straight and dust cleared. The missing remain so left, tucked behind busy tasks, tidy work to be done day and again. Before unfolding blankets, the daughter, father, and mother reach their arms round the table once more to form a clock. One finger from each hand points to the number for sleep, for when brother comes home, for don’t forget. 

Zoe Brooks, "Fool's Paradise"

After living in London for fifteen years Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire to write and grow vegetables. Her collection Owl Unbound was published by Indigo Dreams in 2020. Her long poem for voices Fool’s Paradise is published by Black Eyes Publishing in May 2022. 

For fifteen years, Zoe divided her time between the UK and the Czech Republic, where she lived in a farmhouse under the shadow of the forest in the edge of the Sumava Mountains. Her blog Adventures in the Czech Republic recounts her time there and her love of that country. 

Zoe is a member of the management team for Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She set up and runs the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group and enjoys performing poetry.

About Fool’s Paradise

This book-length mystical poem for voices was written following a visit to Prague immediately after the Velvet Revolution, a time which Zoe describes in her blog Adventures in the Czech Republic:

"... My friend was renewing old acquaintances and exploring business opportunities and so I just took the opportunity in her absence to explore and soak in the atmosphere, and what an atmosphere it was. It is now hard to explain what it felt like back in early 1990. I had no guidebook and instead just walked, following my instinct, often going over the same ground time and again. I was completely breathless with the beauty of the place and felt the city's history – both glorious and sad – reaching out to me from alleyways and courtyards, through the railings of the Jewish quarter and from the facades of once rich buildings. Now the visitor finds the route from Charles Bridge to Town Square lined with hawkers, shops crammed with souvenirs and frankly often tat; then it was quiet and powerful. The statues on Charles Bridge stood alone and silent, without the accompanying flash of cameras and chatter of posing tourists.

"On a number of occasions and at a number of places I came across small shrines of candles and flowers, set up to those who had been murdered by the oppressors. In Wenceslas Square there was a large makeshift memorial to Jan Palach – the student who had burnt himself to death in 1968 as a protest against the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring. Here there was a constant stream of people bringing flowers and lighting candles. It all felt hugely personal. I felt a voyeur watching the people's bowed heads. How could I comprehend what I was seeing? How could I share anything of the emotion that hung like incense in the air? And I was angered by other non-Czech visitors who stood around and took photos of it all.

"I regularly made my way back to the lights and warmth of Cafe Slavia either to meet up with my friend or to drink black Czech coffee and eat the Cafe's rich cakes. Energy and wits refreshed, I would then venture back on to the streets. I do not know whether it was the caffeine or the intensity of emotion in Prague at that time, but I increasingly found myself unable to sleep. In that heightened state I found angels everywhere – statues, in frescos, in pictures. I sensed too a presence in the air: the angels of Prague were weeping and rejoicing."

The poem that followed may have been inspired by that visit. It is not, however, about Prague. The city is in some ways a fusion of Prague and Istanbul, where Zoe had had another inspiring experience. 

The Czech friend who features in Zoe's blog and who introduced Zoe to the Czech Republic was Hannah Kodicek. Hannah, who died in April 2011, was a multi-talented writer, actor and artist. In the latter part of her life she was a story editor – working on the Oscar-winning film The Counterfeiters and advising on Danny Scheinmann's Random Acts of Heroic Love. The monoprints used in this book were created by drawing with acrylic paints on glass and were created in response to the poem. For more about Hannah's life and work see here. To see more about Fool's Paradise by Zoe Brooks, see here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the work. Please click on the individual pages to read them. 

From Fool's Paradise, by Zoe Brooks

Sue Hubbard, "Swimming to Albania"

 

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. She has won numerous prizes and, as The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, created London’s largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo station. Her poems have appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer, The London Magazine and many leading poetry magazines and anthologies, been read on Radio 3,  Radio 4 and RTE, and recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive.  Twice a Hawthornden Fellow, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and in 1999 was awarded a major Arts Council Award. She has published three previous collections of poetry, a collection of short stories and three novels. As an art critic she has been a regular contributor to The Independent, Time Out, The New Statesman, The London Magazine, and published a book of essays on art, Adventures in Art (Other Criteria). Her latest poetry collection is Swimming to Albania (Salmon Press). Her website is here. 

About Swimming to Albania, by Sue Hubbard

Swimming to Albania is my fourth collection. It deals with memory, loss, desire and the process of ageing. Divided into three parts, there are elegies to both my parents and tactile, Proustian remembrances of childhood and the everyday. The poems wander between the west coast of Ireland, Lisbon, Siena and Greece in an attempt to find reconciliation, forgiveness and meaning, to come to terms with different forms of grief.  As I say in the final section, 'we travel to discover who we are.' Threaded through the collection is the sense of an Odyssean journey, a longing for an idealised home, which is captured in the title poem: 'Swimming to Albania.' 

From Swimming to Albania

Lost in Space

There are galaxies inside me,

interstellar stars and dust. 

I am full of dark matter,

quarks and spirals

of deep love that cannot

be seen with the naked eye,

lives that might have been

different under other alignments.

Somewhere amid the black holes

and absorption of light,

beyond the mass of the Milky Way,

there’s a distant room:

the walls covered with faded flowers,

a meadow of flecked sunlight, 

where a child lies beneath 

a bleached quilt in a narrow bed 

dreaming of a boat 

with a single blue sail,

a boat that will take her home.

 

And soon …

                          soon, it will be over,

the voyage’s end coming into sight

like a bright spit of unmapped land,

as the old yawl turns slowly back into harbour

with its arbour of rusty fish sheds

shrouded in late evening fog.

The saffron light of portholes already dimmed,

the tattered sails lowered,

halyard and spinnakers stilled and trimmed,

furled jibs lashed against the mast.

A sea away I wait on this Atlantic headland

where icy galaxies keep me company in the dark

and a dog-fox barks in a high wet field.

While in those far off Surrey hills

you falter and wane, so I wish my childhood songs

had not been mined in dust and pain,

those black diamonds of hurt and absence.

And now, when all that’s unspoken

is cinders on my tongue, I want to call out:

daddy, oh my daddy, I’ve been here all along,

waiting, waiting across this cold violet sea.

 

Charles G Lauder Jr, "The Aesthetics of Breath"

Charles G Lauder Jr was born in San Antonio, Texas, lived for a few years each on America’s East and West Coasts, and moved to south Leicestershire, UK, in 2000. His poems have been published widely in print and online, and in his two pamphlets Bleeds (Crystal Clear Creators, 2012) and Camouflaged Beasts (BLER, 2017). From 2014 to 2018, he was the Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House, and for over twenty-five years he has copy-edited academic books on literature, history, medicine, and science. His debut poetry collection is The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press, 2019). He is on Twitter @cglauder

About The Aesthetics of Breath, by Charles G Lauder Jr

The Aesthetics of Breath, my debut poetry collection and most recent book, focuses on history, both public and personal. Some of the poems are about well-known historical figures like Einstein and Napoleon, as well as America's past, whereas others are about my Texas childhood. Quite a few explore masculinity and my relationship with my father, and what it means to live as an ex-pat for the past two decades. The book ends with a sequence of a dozen poems about family relationships and home.

From The Aesthetics of Breath

Time and Distance

There’s a doppelganger in my house,
taller, slimmer, mistaken for me
over the phone. He cries like I do

but that serrated tongue can cut
those closest to him, hissing out
when he’s cornered and angry.

He brings up Star Wars and Doctor Who,
he knows I like to talk about them,
as if he’s learning, but avoids girls and sex.

He won’t swear, prefers the sweetness
of sugar and fudge; at fourteen,
I was dared and haven’t stopped since.

I protest I am more than number tricks,
facts and figures about space and light,
or what Tudors ate for dinner. Maybe

he is more than I ever could be.
Friends say he’s a time traveller,
that he’s really me from the past,

but surely I would remember this.
Is he proof of a parallel universe 
bleeding into ours? I know what’s next:

rebellion into booze, weed, and speed,
though he can’t stand the taste of beer.
He’ll discover his father’s feet,

gravity-tacky, are made of clay,
have never left earth. There will
be time and distance between them.

Sir Walter Raleigh of Bexar County, Texas

Returned from England I bestow this gift of grandchildren

like valuable treasure laid at your feet   you the king and queen

          and I magus explorer buccaneer spy

          blown in from the cold of the New World

                   after seven eight years

                   with natives half-naked half-crazed.

Their DNA is a cypher spelling out rough and tumble gorse

          hawthorn and bramble shredding the balls of thumbs

                   ancient ponds where witches floated and innocent drowned

                   great warriors asleep underground await to be woken

                              steed-shaped headlands stampede into the sea

                                        seawater spewing from black nostrils.

The dead   revered in song and story around the fire of a once

magnificent empire trading in flesh opium and tea

           lost generations buried in mud   burned by mustard

           dance as shadows on these chalky faces wild as dandelion and nettle

             she on all fours roars and hisses      scratches at the air

                     he poised and on guard   finger pointed and cocked.

***

On the journey here through Detroit to Oklahoma

then a two-storey train down into Texas

           they marveled at how high we were   mountains of snow

           replaced by a sun so hot it burned their ears as we landed.

Wires crisscross overhead like a cage   snakes hide at their feet 

at the museum they circle round mammoth and saber-tooth

           hunched down and looking for the moment

           to spring   then pose beside their fresh kills.

Your feast of grilled cheese sandwiches tastes of rubber

pickles too bitter   bacon thin and greasy   their first doughnut

            takes them two days to finish before they finally give up

                       and chase each other for miles.

Night is as bright as day   lit up door to door with Christmas lights

front-lawn inflatable Santas snowmen and kings   they clap

            and shout    try to catch fake snow on their tongue

                        but turn down your offer of church.

***

 

You notice a change of accent when I translate

that I’ve lost my bearings   how to find the corner store

            my old school   where old girlfriends lived.

            America has grown small in my absence

                       a fear and hysteria grips the kidneys

                       so hard no one can piss

                       without a loaded pistol in hand.

You think he’s gone over   painted his skin

bowed down to trees and standing stones

           tossed coins and armour into the river

           to appease angry gods    and take me to the preacher

                      who tells me there is no saviour but Jesus.

What should I confess? That I stood naked in a circle

about the fire handfasted to a daughter of Mercia

            calling forth spirits of the forest

            to fill my limbs while I fill her

                        with my seed and the air

                        with mud-moon howls,

yielding this ragwort   this cornflower   their fevered heads

buzz with my memories of glass and steel cities   fibre-optic

            highways    of drive-thrus   drive-ins    gated driveways

                      of starting over   the pelts from their backs

                      traded for new clothes   new name   new face.

Scarlett Ward Bennett (ed.), "Elements: Natural & The Supernatural"

About Elements: Natural & The Supernatural, ed. Scarlett Ward Bennett

Elements is an anthology of poetry inspired by the natural and supernatural elements of the universe and beyond. From the molecular chaos of running water and the impatient budding of leaves in Spring, to the whispering aether that fills the darkness of night, this anthology explores and celebrates the natural world, spiritual entities, and the forces at work all around us. It is the first title published by new publisher, Fawn Press, and is edited by Scarlett Ward Bennett with the help of Lexia Tomlinson and Konnie Colton.  

About the editor

Scarlett Ward Bennett is a poet, workshop facilitator, editor and Director of Fawn Press. She founded Fawn Press in August 2021, with a vision of helping to bring beautiful poetry anthologies, pamphlets, and collections into the world. Her debut poetry collection Ache was released in 2019 with Verve Poetry press, and her work has featured in Under the Radar, Eyeflash Poetry, and Burning Eye. She is a workshop facilitator for Writing West Midlands and Homegrown 31, and visits schools around the country to deliver fun and engaging workshops to young people. She has worked as editor for On Your Doorstep Magazine and has worked as an editor for single-poet projects. She came runner up in 2019’s Verve Community competition, judged by Joelle Taylor, and the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Competition, judged by Roy McFarlane. Scarlett was nominated for a Sabotage Award for Best Spoken Word Artist in 2018, and in 2016, her poetry evening Cafe Del Nino was nominated for Best Spoken Word event.

About the publisher

New publisher Fawn Press aims to publish beautiful books of exceptional poetry, as we believe that poetry has the power to change lives through that transcendental connection between writer and reader. Storytelling lies at the very soul of our experience as human beings, connecting us since the dawn of time. We hope to be a platform that welcomes all writers, rejecting elitist and pompous attitudes to publishing in favour of an inclusive approach, whilst maintaining a high quality of exceptional writing that excites and inspires: “Poetry that takes you by the hand and leads you into the woods.” Fawn Press emerged from a passionate love of books and literature, as well as the recognition that the world needs more representation of new and under-represented poets. We are dedicated to the continual growth, education, and application of diversity.

Below, you can read two sample poems from our new anthology.

 

From Elements

Oxygen

Think of a million mouths pursed into an O
and inhaling together, one giant in-suck.

Forget that dream where you always wake
gasping and clutching at your throat.

Think of bubbles rising in a lake –
like them we must release ourselves towards air.

Now that the cool has come, the edges
have softened in the garden a little, our wren

is at ease with herself and we of late
have taken to sitting out, fanning ourselves

and watching the deepening shadows.
There is an art to this – to breathing easy;

half lung-capacity and half blind faith
that the next breath will come, 

that we will not flounder and choke
on our filthy emissions, on sticky particulates,

that we will, somehow, mostly, get it right.
Not unlike like that river fish, the pike,

who lords it over his river underlings,
his green slime-shimmer stalled among the weeds,

his razor- jaws, so cruel, so cannibal,
his habit, or if you like, his trick

of flicking his prey to swallow it head first,
and whole, and live.

How he only rarely misjudges, gags,
thrashes a little, turns belly up and dies.

- Róisín Tierney

 

Ode to the Mirror Carp

I.
Look! How they spin, fins vibrating and O-mouthed, 
scales beating in a blood-rush. 

Mother asks: have you ever heard a fish scream? 
It’s like a body rupturing, eating itself whole before re-entering the womb.

This is how girl becomes woman.

II.
There’s a burning in their stomachs only death can cure.
Their hunger? Watch it rage, it’s the only thing that draws fish out of water. 

See their bodies pirouette for the last time,
they’ll stop squirming soon. 

This is how a woman lives. 

III.
Mother reels them in. 
I have her hands – I know, mine are just as impossible to hold.

Dinner will be served soon. 
I open and close my mouth, and swim, and swim. 

This is how we survive. 

- Nabeela Saghir

Ellie Fleur Johnson, "Phonetic A Bee Seas"

Hello fellow Creative Writers, let me formally introduce myself to you: I’m Ellie Fleur Johnson. I graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester last year, and since then I have been working on a novel which centres on themes of feminism, sisterhood and rape culture. I have also freelanced in marketing, shadow-writing and copy-writing. But that’s not what I’m here to discuss today!

Ladies and Gentleman (and non-binaries), I'm here to tell you I have written and illustrated a book, which I have self-published. The book is called Phonetic A Bee Seas, a rather hilarious pun on ‘ABCs,’ if I say so myself. Follow Tommy Fire-Tiger and Daisy Wood-Dog as they explore the Phonetic Alphabet together. You may be fooled by the cute cartoonish drawings inside, but this book is strictly NOT for children. Phonetic A Bee Seas includes the following: sex and drug references, adult language, graphic images and bad puns. 

What started off as a silly inside joke between myself and my partner quickly developed into random doodles and nonsensical scribbles. I found that the project was something to focus on  during lockdown, a release and diversion.

My partner is a pilot and uses the Phonetic Alphabet on a daily basis. It's something I have neither remembered nor understood. My anxiety builds every time a person uses it to spell out their postcode: 'Echo Tango Foxtrot Six Seven Nine Bravo Sierra.' I’m left trying to form some sort of sentence out of the mess, flabbergasted. Aghast. Or worse, they ask me to use it. Why not 'Egg Toe Fishfingers Six Seven Nine Bumblebee Sausage-Loops'? It’s beyond me. 

My book explores the ‘real’ Phonetic Alphabet whilst also suggesting a fun alternative. It’s for those who use it on a daily basis, those who want to learn, or those who enjoy an easy laugh. You can find it available to buy here.

If you’d like to delve deeper into my writing then my website here is the place to go.

Here’s a cheeky preview of Phonetic A Bee Seas ....

Lydia Towsey, "The English Disease"

Lydia Towsey is a poet, performer, cat keeper, mother and ukulele strummer – with an MA in Creative Writing and a primary school certificate in "tap dancing." Previously shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, she’s spoken and performed everywhere from London’s 100 Club, Roundhouse and the House of Lords, to "On the Buses," with Literary Leicester and Arriva (bus company).

Commissioned by the Guardian, Royal Albert Hall, Kew Gardens, Apples and Snakes, Poet in the City and more, Lydia has UK toured three shows, funded by Arts Council England. In 2018 she was one of the artists listed for the Outspoken London Prize for Poetry in Film and in the UK Saboteur Awards for Best Show (The Venus Papers) and for Best Spoken Word Performer.

In addition to her practice as a writer and performer, Lydia works for Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and is the Artistic Director of WORD! – a poetry organisation delivering one of the longest running poetry nights in the UK.

Widely published in journals and anthologies (with Bloodaxe Books, Candlestick Press, Five Leaves and others) her debut collection, The Venus Papers, was published by Burning Eye Books in 2015. The English Disease is her second collection. 

The English Disease (Burning Eye, 2019)

"The English Disease" has been coined as a term to describe everything from missed penalties and vitamin D deficiency, to no sex please, tea and rickets. Exploring contemporary world events, including the international migration crisis and the British EU Referendum, alongside the lived experience of becoming a mother in a year of celebrity death and continental fracture, this collection examines the condition afresh.

With zombies, cats, Bowie, break-ups and the weather; eating disorders, buses, Beatrix Potter, queueing, nature, war and nursery rhymes, The English Disease draws upon class, colonialism and other undead matters to explore identity at a time of now … apocalypse?

“This book is a new national anthem. Visual, vivid, curious and kind” (Joelle Taylor).

You can see a trailer about the book here. 

And below is a poem from the collection: 


Love Poem to a Zombie Government

You – are my sugar lump,
my spark in the dark, prairie flower,
swamp duck, blue cheese,
break-in-the-clouds, apocalypse breeze. 

You’re my Sunday, Monday, Tuesday week
at the knees and in the feet.
Last night I dreamt you tried to kill me.

You’re my chickadee,
sweet pea, sweetheart, honey,
baby, darling, kick 
the bucket.

My sun, my moon, my stars, my rain,
baby; last night I dreamt you tried to kill me, again.

Cathy Galvin, "Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva"

Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva is Cathy Galvin’s third sequence of poetry, following Black & Blue (2014) and Rough Translation (2016). Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and journals including Agenda, Visual Verse, Morning Star and the  Leicester magazine, New Walk. She is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship and residency at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, Achill Island. She is currently completing a collection and poetry practice PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is also a journalist and editor, founder of the Sunday Times Short Story Award and of the short story organisation, Word Factory. Her website is www.cathygalvin.com. 

Below, Cathy talks about her new collection, and you can also read a sample from it. 

Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva
By Cathy Galvin 

Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva has been a long, colourful journey. I used to walk under the ring road from home into the city centre; as a teenager to catch buses to and from school, or to sneak into pubs underage or to the Locarno to watch ska and punk bands including The Specials and Sex Pistols; for nights out with first boyfriends or for geeky moments in the library a short walk away from where Philip Larkin also drank as a teenager. 

The road is modernist, brutal and mysterious: it follows the outline of the ruined walls of this former great medieval city; it was built by postwar workers like my parents who had come to live in a city that represented progress, economic stability and an egalitarian education for their children. Research at the city's Herbert Gallery revealed the road had been built the year I was born by George Wimpey And Co for the Coventry Corporation for the grand sum of £73,000. Today, sadly, my walks in the shadow of the ring road often take me to the London Road Cemetery where my parents are buried a short distance from the mass grave for those Coventry residents killed in the Blitz. 

The place is in my soul. This sequence attempts to reach into the spirit of the place and its psycho-geography. The inspiration for this sequence came from Dante's circular walks through purgatory with the poet Virgil: what better companion than the legendary Lady Godiva? She was a thoughtful guide and offered a wisdom relevant to today. 

Luke Thompson, the inspirational editor and founder of the Guillemot Press, who published this poem, writes: "In this sequence Godgifu (Lady Godiva) guides the poet and reader along the titular road, circling the medieval city boundaries through demolition and bomb sites, past graveyards and Epstein’s angel, over rivers and monasteries, in a personal, poetic, spiritual and psychogeographic exploration of the city in which the poet was born."

David Morley writes: "Ring Road is a wonderful realisation of the poetry that is Coventry's past, present, and future: an archaeology and rediscovering of what it means to be a citizen of this fabled city."

Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva has been beautifully illustrated by 
Kristy Campbell, and printed on Mohawk Superfine papers and section sewn, with end papers from Fedrigoni. It is dedicated to the workers of Coventry. You can find more details about the collection here.

The sequence is divided into cantos - here's a flavour of the first: 


Beside me in the Cheylesmore underpass, 
she took my hand and said: Abandon fear. 
Sky Blues in red Doc Martens threw their cans

and punks in two-tone sang their ghost town near. 
We walked ahead to where an island framed 
walls friars had rescued from a king. 

Looking within to workhouse grounds 
Godgifu bent to lift a plate, broken in the dust, 
that once touched lips made Holy by the flesh 

and blood of Christ. Told me, 
beside a cloister door, to taste the food 
of lives that went before on Pancheon Blue, 

Chinoiserie Porcelain, English Stone, 
Cistercian Underglaze, Staffordshire Slip; 
liturgy of clinker, glassy tap slag, bottles. Brick.