Pedophobia – the excessive fear of children – is a staple within the horror genre, unsettling and interrogating our primal instinct towards nurturing the young. There’s the sadistic son in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, the adolescent cult in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, or the tribal warfare of stranded schoolboys Read More
All Tied Up The rain falls in diagonal lines, bouncing off the roof of the car in continuous percussion. Water streams down the sloped driveway towards the house where the front door opens and a figure steps out. A man’s boot lands heavily in a puddle, sending water flying. “For fuck’s sake,” he exclaims eyeing Read More
Under The Weather – KT Tunstall (2004) /on homesickness I inherited my voice from my mum. On the phone, no one can tell as apart. Even my gran, her mother, used to mistake us. She would to talk to me for a whole five or six minutes before asking ‘what’s Rebecca doing?’ She thought she Read More
How do you cut into what Elizabeth Chakrabarty terms ‘the Trojan horse’ of the essay? Whether it’s lyrical, discursive, inter-medial, associative, reflective, self-reflexive, or something yet undefined, from the outset of Imagined Spaces, the form is as far from the familiar academic expectation as may be dreamt. What then is this literal try, this attempt, Read More
It is not the question of How the Hell are You, but rather the question of who the hell were we (‘How The Hell Are You.’) that encapsulates Glyn Maxwell’s most recent poetry collection of the same title. Maxwell has won many awards for his poetry and has been previously shortlisted twice for the TS Read More
In Angie Cruz’s third novel, shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, a young country girl is trapped by circumstance in a patriarchal society on the brink of civil war. Forced into marriage with a violent, alcoholic man twice her age, fifteen-year-old protagonist Ana Canción carries the burden of her family’s future on her young Read More
Casket Andy Brown Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Below This Level Kevin Corcoran Shearsman (2019); pbk: £6.50 Lake Effect Tim Craven Tapsalteerie (2019); pbk: £5 Three excellent pamphlets, produced by courageous independent publishers, and it’s fair to say there are crossing references, though I will treat them alphabetically. Nonetheless, the booklets are very different creatures. However, Read More
‘The words […] a line of curses, promises, demands, wishes, intoxicants and offerings […] sets all the prayers in the house to glint.’ (From ‘Vespers’, All The Prayers In The House, Miriam Nash). Having grown up in the Catholic faith, courted by pictures and other icons of the tradition (usually from a shrine shop in Read More
To shout ‘I love you’ from the rooftops seems such a 70’s thing to do but that’s exactly what one student living in Dundee’s Hawkhill did for his girlfriend around 1970. Joseph McKenzie (1929-2015) immortalised the romantic gesture in a black and white still that inspired the title for this exhibition. The student painted his Read More
Tiger Girl is Pascale Petit’s eighth collection. Her previous works include Mama Amazonica which has won, among others, the Ondaatje Prize. This is a rare win for a woman, and for a poet too since the prize is usually awarded to travel writers. But when it comes to Petit’s work, this honour makes sense. Reading Read More