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. 

Rishi Dastidar, "A hobby of mine"

Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by the Financial Times, New Scientist and the BBC, amongst many others. His third collection, Neptune’s Projects (Nine Arches Press), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize, and a poem from it was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He is also editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). He reviews poetry for The Guardian and is chair of Wasafiri. His latest publication is A hobby of mine (Broken Sleep Books).

A hobby of mine, by Rishi Dastidar
My publisher says: “In A hobby of mine, Rishi Dastidar’s unrelenting catalogue of cultural observations becomes an absurd and profound portrait of modern life. With a playful spirit and incisive wit, Dastidar examines identity, memory, and the contradictions of everyday existence. He invites us to consider the idiosyncrasies that shape how we navigate a fragmented world, and the hidden dimensions of our routines: repetition becomes revelation – if we pay enough attention.”

I say: it was also a way for me to pay tribute and homage to Joe Brainard, and his wonderful memoir, I remember. Think of my attempt as a way exhausting some current obsessions, in a very George Perec-esque way too.

You can read more about A hobby of mine on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two extracts from the book. 

From A hobby of mine

Extract 1:

A hobby of mine is perverting the course of language.

A hobby of mine is the habit of mining.

A hobby of mine is wondering what the modern equivalent of mining school in nineteenth century Europe is.

A hobby of mine is running away to Rome.

A hobby of mine is imagining living in the south of France with a large of amount of cash that is demanding to be whittled away.

A hobby of mine is telling people why I haven’t launched a Substack yet.

A hobby of mine is deciding which of the endangered heritage crafts I should attempt to pick up.

A hobby of mine is calling the sun my father.

A hobby of mine is sitting in the middle of the road, crying that the passing scooters won’t stop and play with me.

A hobby of mine is wishing I was a cat.

A hobby of mine is knowing I would have been a very good clerk for the East India Company.

A hobby of mine is cultivating an emollient aspect to my personality.

Extract 2:

A hobby of mine is asking: how would David Foster Wallace have written it?

A hobby of mine is attempting to write things the way David Foster Wallace might have done, and failing.

A hobby of mine is buying any second-hand edition of The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth I ever see.

A hobby of mine is Tabasco.

A hobby of mine is predicting when money dies.

A hobby of mine is predicting when Miami sinks.

A hobby of mine is thinking up sports entertainment formats for a post-apocalyptic planet.

A hobby of mine is re-litigating the past until it asks to be taken from the courtroom and hanged until it is dead.

A hobby of mine is saying ‘wait till next year’ even though I know my team will be crap then also.

A hobby of mine is only reading my horoscope when I feel some part of my life is out of control.

A hobby of mine is opening all the cupboards in the kitchen looking for chocolate to eat, even though I know there isn’t any in the house.

Lisa Marie Basile, "SAINT OF"

 

Lisa Marie Basile is an NYC-based author, poet, and journalist. She is the author of a few collections of poetry, including SAINT OF, Nympholespy (finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal, and Andalucia. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Tinderbox Poetry, Spork Press, Best Small Fictions, Best American Experimental Writing, and more. She has also led workshops or spoken in panel discussions at Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, and more. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School in New York City. She is an advocate for chronic illness awareness and foster youth, and is the founding editor of Luna Luna. Her website is here. 

About SAINT OF
SAINT OF is a gilded exploration of hunger—the hunger for the erotic, the ancestral, the forbidden, divinity, and reclamation. With themes of grief, illness, and generational trauma woven alongside sensuality and beauty, this collection is both sacrament and defiance. It traces the contours of longing, ruin, and transformation, blurring the boundaries between the carnal and the celestial. These poems are not only an invocation of saints—they are a declaration of self.

You can read more about SAINT OF here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From SAINT OF, by Lisa Marie Basile

Anne Caldwell, "Neither Here Nor There"

 

Dr Anne Caldwell is a writer and editor, based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. She lectures in Creative Writing at the Open University as well as working as an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. Her writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and internationally, including The Rialto, Spelt Magazine, Tract, Poetry Wales, Rabbit and Axon. She has published a number of poetry collections including Painting the Spiral Staircase (Cinnamon Press, 2016). In 2019, she was the co-editor of The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, alongside Oz Hardwick. Her fourth collection of prose poetry was Alice and the North (Valley Press). She was the co-editor of Prose Poetry Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022) with Oz Hardwick. Anne writes about the natural world, our relationship to it, and revels in the stories, place names and characters of the north of England. This year she is a winner of a James Tait Prize, and has a new pamphlet of poetry out called Neither Here nor There, with SurVision Press. Twitter (X): @caldwell_anne 

 

 

About Neither Here Nor There 
Neither Here Nor There is a prize-winning pamphlet of prose poems that celebrates the in-between places and states of mind we can inhabit. The writing is firmly rooted in a sense of place and eco-poetics, as well as an exploration of the turbulence of climate change and the pandemic. Prose poetry is a flexible form that is brilliant at holding contradictions and juxtapositions: qualities that are exploited in a search for love and a deep connection with a wilder, natural world in these quietly immersive poems. Inspired by Anne Carson, Anne has used a double justified rectangle of text in each of the poems, so that the work resembles the grid squares on a map. The organising principle of the work is the prose poetry form and the way it can present a series of vignettes that mix the details of ordinary life with dreams and myth, the real and the fairytale, where humans transform into birds and language is lost and found. The world of this pamphlet is spinning out of reach. The prose poems explore landscapes, urban and rural, where our connections to each other have been fragmented and stretched. As the poem "Unrequited" suggests, "The language of now is short and full of gaps." Here is a sense of playfulness in the writing, as the prose poems combine the down-to-earth cadences of prose and the lyrical, musical intensity of poetry at the same time. 

You can read more about Neither Here Nor There on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample prose poems from the collection. 

From Neither Here Nor There, by Anne Caldwell

Aqueduct 

Walls were less rigid when I was young. Bedrooms expanded when love bloomed and contracted as grief swallowed the family, made it lemon-sour and pithy.  Hiding in the bottom of the wardrobe, I would listen to the bitterness of mother and father. I’d a penknife, a lucky stone and a ball of string.  I owned a hand-me-down bike and found a cycle route to Astbury, cutting beneath the canal aqueduct.  The air was damp and cool; the brickwork smothered in moss. 

A stalactite childhood lay here, lingering beneath that body of water. Beneath tadpoles and crested newts; beneath rusty shopping trollies and lead fishing sinkers. 

Glass Blower 

And this dim-lit life is a glass vase in the making. Needs blowing and warming. Alice loads her rod with molten liquid from the furnace, rolling the orange glow to over 900 degrees in wet newspaper. Life begins to cool a little and harden. She doesn’t wear gloves as she dips the glass in powdered cobalt. She blows, then places her thumb over the rod until the glass begins to swell into a sphere, catching an air bubble at its centre. Keep turning. Keep blowing. Find life’s heat and joy. Don’t stop moving. 

Michael Rosen, "Many Different Kinds of Love"

 

Michael Rosen, photograph by David Levene

Michael Rosen is renowned for his work as a poet, performer, broadcaster and scriptwriter. He is Professor of Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London and visits schools with his one-man show to enthuse children with his passion for books and poetry. In 2007 he was appointed Children's Laureate, a role which he held until 2009. While Laureate, he set up The Roald Dahl Funny Prize. He currently lives in London with his wife and children. His website is here. 

About Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS

Michael Rosen wasn't feeling well. Soon he was struggling to breathe, and then he was admitted to hospital, suffering from coronavirus as the nation teetered on the edge of a global pandemic. 

What followed was months on the wards: six weeks in an induced coma, and many more weeks of rehab and recovery as the NHS saved Michael's life, and then got him back on his feet. 

Combining stunning new prose poems and the moving coronavirus diaries of his nurses, doctors and wife Emma-Louise Williams, and featuring illustrations by Chris Riddell, this is a beautiful book about love, life and the NHS. Each page celebrates the power of community, the importance of kind gestures in dark times, and the indomitable spirits of the people who keep us well. 

You can read more about Many Different Kinds of Love on the publisher's website here. You can read a short review of the book by Lisa Williams on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read a sample prose poem from the book. 

From Many Different Kinds of Love, by Michael Rosen

The coma keeps secrets.

There is no place for the coma in 

the geography of my memory. 

I can't visit the coma. 

I can't call for it. 

If I try to find it,

if I plead for it to come, 

it doesn't hear. 

Or if it hears, 

it refuses to come out of its cave

and tell me what happened. 

It hangs back in the shadows

forbidding me from 

having a conversation

There isn't even a sign saying:

'This is not a memory.'

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, "Sing me down from the dark"

 

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University and an MA in Japanese Language and Culture from Sheffield University. She lives in Newcastle and is module leader for the International Foundation programme in Humanities at Newcastle University. In the last year, she was published in The North, The Moth, Poetry Wales, Fenland Poetry Journal, The Frogmore Papers, Tears in the Fence, The Alchemy Spoon, Obsessed with Pipework and The Cannon’s Mouth. Online her work can be found in Anthropocene, The High Window and London Grip. 

She came third in the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and in the 2020 'To Sonnet or Not' Competition. In 2021, she was shortlisted for Winchester and Troubadour prizes and this year she had two poems shortlisted by Billy Collins for the Fish Prize. She read at the 2021 Aldeburgh and Winchester Poetry festivals, alongside poets Wendy Cope and Jacqueline Saphra, and performed as a featured poet at the 2022 Tears in the Fence festival, in Dorset. Her debut collection, Sing me down from the dark, is now out with Salt Publishing.

About Sing me down from the dark, by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

Sing me down from the dark explores the highs and lows of a ten-year sojourn in Japan, two international marriages, a homecoming, and the struggles of cross-cultural relationships. It is full of light and dark, as if the writer herself has been ‘caught off guard’ in the making of these poems.

You can read more about Sing me down from the dark on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Sing me down from the dark 

Body Language 

You rub up behind me as I wipe the Sainsbury’s shop. Like that time babysitting when Bruce, the randy labrador, stood on his hind legs and whined. I was fourteen and had to shut him outside. He scratched at the door. As I leave for my lockdown walk, you say: etchi kangaite ne. Etchi: horny; aroused. Four months ago I took down our wedding photos. That 31-year-old on Waimanolo beach didn’t feel like me. 

I put up a painting of turbulent waves by Bamburgh fort. The trigger was an argument about Machiko, your sister-in-law. You defended her awfulness to me. Because she is Japanese. And the lack of sex. What do you expect when you’ve chosen to be on a futon in the spare room? And going back to the wedding photos, it took you a month to notice. You said you were so sad you could write a poem. 

You say I am no longer sharp –– a ‘loan word’ for slim –– yet I thought the Japanese love the notion of shiawase butori, plump, happily married women. When I lose a few pounds you say: beijin ne natta ne –– you’ve regained beauty. Once upon a time, you were all that I could see. I watched you sleep. 

And the day Scottish Maggie died –– lovely mad Maggie, who made me tupperwares of butter tablet –– you wouldn’t shut up. Kept saying sorry. But you met her only once. I wanted to shout shut the fuck up. Sei Sensei says the Japanese are good at carrying boxes when you move house. Today, as I leave this house, you ask, with a teenagerish grin, if I’m having an affair. In the exact same way you ask if I’ve sorted the recycling. 

Aidan Semmens, "The Jazz Age: An Entertainment"

 

Aidan Semmens has been publishing poetry in small-press magazines since the mid-1970s, apart from a gap of around sixteen years from 1985 to 2001. A former winner of the Cambridge University Chancellor’s Medal for an English Poem, and a former chair of the Cambridge Poetry Society, he published his first pamphlet in 1978, but it was not until 2011 that his first full collection, A Stone Dog, appeared from Shearsman Books. Five more volumes have followed since, most recently The Jazz Age, one of the titles chosen by Salt Publishing to relaunch its Salt Modern Poets series. After a 43-year career in journalism, mostly as a sports sub-editor and writer, he now lives in Orkney, where he continues to work online.

About The Jazz Age, by Aidan Semmens

Having previously tended to write darker, more “difficult” poetry – The Book of Isaac is a sequence of “distressed sonnets,” while Life Has Become More Cheerful is largely about the Russian Revolution, its causes and outcomes – I was encouraged to produce this lighter, funnier and more accessible book by the response I got at readings to some of the early pieces in it, which confirmed the publisher’s description of it as “laugh-out-loud funny.” It consists of a loosely structured sequence of prose vignettes, surreal fantasies in which famous figures from (mostly) the past – sometimes singly, sometimes in unlikely pairings – make incongruous, anachronistic appearances in modern settings and situations, or in episodes from times not their own.

I can’t really say how I began writing these rather whimsical pieces, but once I did it became quite compulsive. Characters, scenes and phrases would suggest themselves to me on dog walks, so a whole poem / story (The Fortnightly Review billed them as “very short fictions”) would be fully composed by the time I got home; or they would take shape as I lay awake in bed at night. The process began purely as an entertainment for myself, so I was delighted to find others seemed to be entertained too. I can’t stop now, so there’s sure to be another volume some time, should anyone want it.

You can read more about The Jazz Age on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read four sample pieces from it. 

From The Jazz Age

La vie en rose

Tiring at last of gazing out over the streets and monuments of Haussmann’s new Paris from the heights of Montmartre, Eleanor of Anjou turns on her heel and walks away. She has always loved the phrase ‘she turned on her heel,’ since encountering it long ago in the pages of some otherwise forgotten gem of children’s literature, though there, no doubt, the pronoun was strictly male. In much the same way she has always loved the crunch of feet on gravel, and been drawn to heavy black boots of the kind she now wears, ever since watching as a child the ominous opening of an early episode of Z-Cars.

The first Churchills

Idly flicking through Facebook while she waits for the bus, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, comes across something that causes her to spit her Wrigley’s spearmint in startled fury – a close-up of the Duke in intimate nightclub clinch with her till-now friend Marie-Antoinette. By the time she gets to Woodstock her status has changed from ‘In a relationship’ to ‘It’s complicated.’

A walk in the woods

Arrested by the sudden appearance of a dark shadow among the trees, Walt Disney halts in his tracks. The thing moves just slightly towards him, then stands its ground. He can tell it is bigger than him. It may be a bear or perhaps an unfeasibly large dark mouse with perfectly spherical protruding ears. Walt holds his breath. Somewhere behind him, Pocahontas has the whole scene in the telescopic sights of her high-velocity hunting rifle. She takes careful aim, trigger-finger poised. Are the crosshairs trained on the bear or on Walt? How accurate will her shot be?

Ferdinand Magellan misses his connection at Mombasa

He cannot understand why Africa is known as the Dark Continent. It does not seem dark to him. Indeed, its days seem almost unnaturally, not to say excessively, bright. He should not have elected to wear this shirt. The sun has burned a likeness of Che Guevara into the skin of his chest.

Jaimie Gusman, "Anyjar"

Jaimie Gusman is a writer and ceramic artist living in Ka‘a‘awa on the island of Oahu. Jaimie earned her MFA in Poetry at the University of Washington and her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa. She is the founder of Mixing Innovative Arts, a reading series that ran from 2010-2019 in Honolulu. Her first book Anyjar was published in September 2017 by Black Radish Books. Jaimie is a recipient of the Rita Dove Poetry Award (2015) and the Ian MacMillan Prize (2012). She also has published three chapbooks: Gertrude's Attic (Vagabond Press, 2012), The Anyjar (Highway 101 Press, 2011), and One Petal Row (Tinfish Press, 2011). In 2020, Jaimie became the editor of Tinfish Press, an experimental poetry press dedicated to publishing work from the Pacific region. Her most recent writing can be found in The Feminist Wire, Black Warrior Review, and DIAGRAM.

About Anyjar

Marthe Reed writes: "Jaimie Gusman’s Anyjar navigates the proliferating forms of body, memory, and self, as the shores of the Anyjar approach and recede without warning. Who, where am I, the Anyjar asks, refusing a single perspective or form. A conch shell, the missing part, one’s heart, womb or nest, a child, death and loss, an incursion, a lament, an invisible sea—the complex matrix of making, artist-writer-animal-person. The instability of the Anyjar, its profligate forms, mirrors the dilemma of the poems’ speaker, who 'a two sea' is herself doubled. The reader finds herself loosed and multiplied, also, in the pages of this collection, the Anyjar as profligate as language itself. 'Memory is not practical but memory is practice.' All that body holds spills out, memory writing us into being, like the knit-work of DNA: Anyjar is a conch shell held to our ears speaking the fabric of (our) making." 

You can read more about Anyjar here. Below, you can read a poem from the collection. 

From Anyjar, by Jaimie Gusman

And like MAGIC Anyjar is Gone

Forgive me, he says, I took the Anyjar and buried it in snow until part of the glass froze and then I tried to break the Anyjar apart with an ax that was underneath the kitchen sink, which I discovered when rain caught the slate-stick and with one, two, twenty smashes the Anyjar wouldn’t budge, which meant that an ax wouldn’t do so I went to the bedroom where I found a chain-saw, revved the engine like a quake of earth and sawed the hell out of the Anyjar, but what happened next was disappointing because nothing shattered except my right knuckles and all bloody and in a bad mood I called a friend to help and the friend said I’ll do anything I can do anything to help a friend so the friend came over with very new rubber gloves and twisted the Anyjar until the friend’s hands looked like new hands but of course we thought if new hands wouldn’t do, any other hands would surely fail to open the Anyjar, so then I thought extremely hard about everything and we began to make a catapult from space and flung the Anyjar into the air but it boomeranged right back only to hit the friend in the anything-but-good eye so I ran to get some frozen peas and a patch, and then I got tired so I suggested that maybe the best thing to do was to go get a blanket (take the one the dog sleeps on) and drape it over the Anyjar and just like that I sighed and the Anyjar disappeared—so forgive me he says sorry again, it could be anywhere.

Lorette C. Luzajic, "Winter in June"

Lorette C. Luzajic writes from Toronto, Canada. Her flash fiction and prose poetry have been widely published, including in Cleaver, The Citron Review, JMWW, The Miramichi Reader, Unbroken, Ghost Parachute, Cabinet of Heed, and numerous anthologies. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly and was longlisted at Furious Fiction Australia. She has been nominated three times each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Lorette is the creator and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted entirely to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an internationally collected collage and mixed media artist. Her website is here. 

About Winter in June, by Lorette C. Luzajic

Winter in June is a collection of flash fiction and prose poetry, small stories haunted by art history and memories real and imagined. Each piece is inspired by an artist or a work of visual art, but stands alone. You will meet a monk, a stripper, a man obsessed by taxidermy, and take a ride on a train with a man who isn’t there. You will smoke salvia divinorum, the most psychotropic plant known to humankind. You will sample salami in Italy, and join a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Death in Mexico City. You will see the phantom of Flatwoods for yourself, reluctantly attend a bullfight, fall in love with a convict, search for Andy Warhol’s grave, and ask a machine to grant your deepest longings. You will swim with a barracuda and watch a man eat his own grandmother. You will also visit a safe space, an art gallery where there is nothing to see but clean white walls. Even with all this terror and enchantment, it is really just a scrapbook of snapshots of everyday moments and ordinary magic.  

Winter in June is available here. You can see more details here. Below, you can read a sample piece from the collection. 

From Winter in June

Night Flight

Imagine, we were half bird. Our flight is fleeting, yes, but still we sometimes slipped into the sky. You are new to this world and don’t know the half of it. Even so, you show us the way. How to slay the dragons, how to turn the page. We gnaw on plastic poultry legs and rubbery bananas and you fake punch a random price into a toy cash register, hold your grubby paw out for my pocketful of coins. I wouldn’t have wished the world on you, but here you are. You have arrived, starry eyed and surprised. You have a blue-green bike and a matching bow in your hair. You love cucumbers and mangos and the frilliest pajamas. Every word is a victory and you’re starting to string them together. We were dancing in our sock feet in your toy room, stripes and polka dots a blur in your swirl. If only we had more ice cream, you say when I pull out the goodnight story. You stall for time before lights out and I guess it’s the same for all of us. Lord, just one more year, just one more day, just one more hour. But soon you are drifting through the clouds and I watch sleep soften your small face. The moon is your witness, I think, kissing you where she does on your dimple. I cover you in a thin sheet, watch your shifting shoulders, small wings dark as earth.  

“Night Flight” first appeared in Gyroscope Review.

Ruth Stacey, "The Dark Room: Letters to Krista"

 

Ruth Stacey is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Worcester, England. Her first poetry collection Queen, Jewel, Mistress was published by Eyewear Publishing, 2015, and her second full collection, I, Ursula, was published in January 2020 by V. Press Poetry. Her pamphlets include Inheritance, published by Mothers Milk Books in 2017. A duet with another poet, Katy Wareham Morris, the collection explores 19th century experience of motherhood, contrasted with a 21st century mother's voice. Inheritance won Best Collaborative Work at the 2018 Saboteur Awards. Three books have been published with the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. A poetic memoir, How to Wear Grunge, was published in 2018. An experimental pamphlet, Viola the Virgin Queen, illustrated by Desdemona McCannon, was published in 2020, and Ruth's latest work, The Dark Room: Letters to Krista, a collaboration with Krista Kay, was published in 2021. Stacey is currently writing an imagined memoir in poetry of the tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith, as part of her PhD study. 

Ruth's website is here. You can read more about her collection I, Ursula on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

About The Dark Room: Letters to Krista

By Ruth Stacey

I contacted Krista (a Portland, USA, based photographer, who photographed some of the people from the 90s Seattle scene) about using a photograph of her friend Demri Parrott for the cover of my poetry memoir, How to Wear Grunge, but due to a message being missed that didn't happen and I commissioned a painted portrait of Demri instead. Following the publication of the HTWG book, Krista saw the message and contacted me in early summer of 2020, during the pandemic. What followed was a correspondence that revealed many common interests and enabled conversations around the themes of loss, nostalgia for youth, memory, vibrant life and tragic death, preserving memories, whilst sharing our photography and poetry. Those conversations become prose poem letters in The Dark Room, which Krista answered with her enigmatic and compelling photographs. I really enjoy working collaboratively with a visual artist. Creating a sequence with text and image to tell a narrative allows different pathways through the stories that are told. Being able to meet another artist and create a new artefact, and a friendship, was an uplifting experience during a difficult year of lockdown, and these poems reflect the light that is found through art and friendship.

By Krista Kay

This book, The Dark Room, is a collaboration between Ruth Stacey, a sensitive, lovely, deeply talented writer, and myself. We have built a friendship and exchanged letters over the past year or so and many topics we have discussed revolve around memory, nostalgia, regret, love, loss. Ruth has written about Demri before (How to Wear Grunge) and I was struck by her profound ability to think deeply and encapsulate with words the importance of understanding complicated lives. Demri has often come up in our conversations. Demri inspired everyone she touched and made the people around her feel beautiful. I have wanted to share her in a way that honored her bright energy and this book is one way to begin to do that. Ruth and I honor others in our lives that we have lost and together we seek to make sense of their absence and our lives forever changed. https://www.instagram.com/kristakayphoto/

Below, you can read an excerpt from The Dark Room.

From The Dark Room: Letters to Krista

Anne Caldwell, "Alice and the North"

Dr Anne Caldwell is a freelance writer and education specialist, based in West Yorkshire. She has worked for the National Association of Writers in Education, the British Council as their Literature Programme Manager, and currently lectures for the Open University. Her specialism is prose poetry and she is a keen walker. Her poetry has appeared in a range of anthologies and magazines in the UK and internationally. These include The Rialto, Writing Women, The North, Poetry Wales and Stride. Anne has published three collections including Painting the Spiral Staircase (Cinnamon Press, 2016). In 2019, she was co-editor of The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, alongside Oz Hardwick. Some of her prose poems were runners up in The Rialto Pamphlet Competition in 2017. Anne has just been awarded a PhD in Creative Writing, focusing on prose poetry, at the University of Bolton. Her website is here.

About Alice and the North 
Alice and the North (Valley Press 2020) is a sequence of prose poems that form a love-song to the North, its post-industrial landscapes, wild uplands, obsession with weather, seasonal change and awkwardness. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice before her, the lead character shifts and changes as her journey across the North continues; she is at turns playful, sexy, rebellious and adventurous, carving a new identity for the region as she goes. From herring quines to the hidden corners of Manchester, from Lytham St Anne’s to the canals of Congleton, readers are invited to grow up with Alice as she finds her voice – straddling the territory between prose and poetry, exploring the down to earth cadences of everyday speech and the richness of the North’s many idioms and dialects. Alice even finds time to gently tease the 'titans' of Northern poetry, Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage, whose voices have long shaped the poetry-reading public's idea of the North. Now, however, they must step aside and make room for Alice. 

Copies of Alice and the North are available from here. Below, you can read three prose poems from the collection. 

Carrie Etter, "The Shooting Gallery"

Carrie Etter grew up in Normal, Illinois, lived in southern California for thirteen years, and moved to England in 2001. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station Hill, 2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a pamphlet of flash fiction, Hometown (V. Press, 2016). Her latest pamphlet is The Shooting Gallery (Verve, 2020), which you can read about below. Individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Her website is here.

 

About The Shooting Gallery

The Shooting Gallery juxtaposes two series of prose poems: one responding to Czech surrealist artist Toyen's The Shooting Gallery (1939-40), a series of line drawings bringing together imagery of childhood and war; and one responding to US school and university shootings since Columbine High School in 1999. Both series explore the surreality and starkness of this conjunction of youth and violence. You can read an extract from The Shooting Gallery below. You can read more about the pamphlet, and order it here. 

From The Shooting Gallery

Normal Community High School, Illinois, 2012

At first, what rattled / was the proximity, the intimacy— / gunfire only a mile from / my family home. For days I wore the knowledge / like chain mail, my torso / heavier, my shoulders / newly weighted. I Googled. I found in my town Darnall’s Gun Works & Ranges, C.I. Shooting Sports. I found photos of / the aftermath, the brawny teacher leading a column of students / away, away, / the huddled parents, waiting, the / reunions, the mother and son— / — / the son’s t-shirt: a drawing of a boy wearing his baseball cap backwards / his eye to the viewfinder / of a machine gun, its long belt of cartridges ready— / mother
and son and his t-shirt—this / is where I come from.

Two Poems from "The Book of Smaller," by rob mclennan

Photo by Matthew Holmes

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016), and the forthcoming How the alphabet was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2018). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, a former contributor to the Ploughshares blog, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. Here are two poems by him:


from The Book of Smaller


The book of smaller

Everything had to be broken. First, snow-people duel with hair dryers. East through the mouth. I am windowless. Echo. Repeat. The children, asleep. I’ve stew in the slow cooker. Focus now on what crumbles. Aleppo. You are history. It is painful to be so dismissed. A conversation on beauty. The fresh breath of airports, unsealed. The connection one has with the body. Look east, and kneel. The girls are still missing. What doesn’t, instead. I hate this. Boil down into nothing. Mother-of-pearl. The smallest space I can fathom.


Forty-seventh birthday

Along the horizon, a hole opens. How does the line move? The sentence? A jet-liner, manifest. To fence in a heartbeat. To barricade. What does lava protect? What is hidden. A history of volcanos on Mars. They accumulate. Swim so far upstream. Galloping. I would stroll home in the pitch. A hummingbird touches her hair. I would stumble. They banter, they bicker, they argue. Such dark is impossible. I want to surpass myself: sleep.