Recent Reviews

The Velvet Underground

At times harrowing, at times sweet, director Todd Haynes’ lead on this documentary film effectively recreates the sensory overload of a Velvet Underground record. Haynes’ filmography is not shy of experimental musician biopics and documentaries, including I’m Not There (2007) and Sonic Youth: Disappearer (1990). In this instance, the techniques used often submerge the viewer into the avant-garde and counter-culture lifestyles depicted for the film’s larger part to hypnotising and evocative effect.

A Blood Condition

Kayo Chingonyi steps back into a place where the imagination and memory become one. Born in Zambia, brought up in London, and now teaching at Durham University, his collection explores the multiplicity of identity and the emotions that flow into it.

Cheryl’s Destinies

Stephen Sexton’s second collection Cheryl’s Destinies is a postmodern and playful investigation of mysticism, temporality and personal relations. Divided into three acts, these poems flit through space and time, like a fortune teller shuffling her

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collections of Iceland

A. Kendra Greene is no stranger to museums.  As an artist and essayist who has spent most of her career dedicated to museums, she exhibits her own work in museums, and has managed many collections in the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, and the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. She has worked herself into them and around them.  This collection of essays takes Greene far from the United States, searching the curiosities of Iceland’s isolated museums.

Islander

Until 8th September 2021Available to stream from Dundee Rep Theatre Kai Durkin Light spills from a door at the back of the stage inviting us into the theatrical space. The camera pans across a ghost light, an empty auditorium. From backstage, through the door, Bethany Tennick wheels a box onstage and begins setting up her Read More

Men Who Feed Pigeons (Shortlisted, Forward Prizes for Poetry)

Some reckon that to be competition-fit a poem requires an arresting title. With a back catalogue encompassing collection titles as extraordinary as Trembling Hearts in the Bodies of Dogs, People Who Like Meatballs and The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence, Selima Hill brims with relevant expertise. The contents list in this, her latest collection, is a poem in itself.

Poor (SHORTLISTED; FORWARD PRIZES FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2021)

Caleb Femi (Penguin Poetry, 2020); pbk £9.99 The North Peckham Estate, where Caleb Femi’s Forward shortlisted debut collection is set, is infamous for containing the stairwell in which Damilola Taylor died. And yes, death stalks these pages, those streets, as do rage and despair… but so too do love, imagination, defiance. Here is a voice Read More

The Untethered Space

How does one cope with the enormity of losing all four siblings to cancer? In the preface to Carol A Caffrey’s poignant debut collection, The Untethered Space, she writes, ‘I turned to poetry […] to exhale the heavy burden of grief that weighed on me’. She goes on to extend an invitation, ‘pull up a chair and join me at the table.’ We accept, tentatively, in an expectation that is sure to tether reader and poet as we explore the meaning of grief in all of its guises.

Comic Timing (SHORTLISTED; FORWARD PRIZES FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2021)

Holly Pester’s first collection Comic Timing proves to be a very thought-provoking volume and highly deserving of its shortlisting for the Forward Prize’s Best First Collection (2021). Pester creates a deeply personal yet political collection as she weaves between the two to gain a sense of self.

Falling Is Like Flying

Falling is Like Flying is Manon Uphoff’s autobiographical exploration of the traumatic sexual abuse experienced at the hands of her tyrannical father. With a courageous and extraordinary story to share, Uphoff returns to the dark labyrinth of her childhood to ‘catch sight of what I was there: the final doll in the matryoshka. The doll you can’t open.’ Despite her initial reticence, the recollections gather momentum as she relentlessly relives the trauma endured within a family that was both ordinary and deeply disturbed.