Shetland native and Edinburgh Makar (appointed May 2014) Christine de Luca’s most recent collection poses, and obliquely answers, many questions so well. If a pamphlet might be termed a chapbook (originally cheapbook), then only in terms of the price, it might be that. However, from its elegant dull yellow jacket, its buff endpapers and Gerry Read More
Ahren Warner’s first two collections, Confer and Pretty, may have simple titles but inside the covers you’ll find poems teeming with conceptual and linguistic complexities. Both books demand the reader’s full participation – I found myself conferring not only with Warner’s explanatory endnotes but also with Google to find translations of French and Greek words, Read More
The cover of Sheenagh Pugh’s new collection features a photo of the long shadows of two people, standing on a beach, apparently looking back on their own footsteps. Backdropped by a close-up of round, eroded stones in a blue-grey scale, that opening image accurately reflects the title – Short Days, Long Shadows. Focused on the Read More
Ian Duhig has been, to use Lawrence Sterne’s own phrase, “Shandying about” in Yorkshire for Digressions, his collaboration with artist-printmaker, Philippa Troutman. In 2013, the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth, they set out from Shandy Hall, Coxwold in North Yorkshire where The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was written, to celebrate Sterne’s great work through Read More
J. Michael Shell’s The Apprentice Journals follows the story of Spaul, one of the few remaining Apprentices in a post- apocalyptic America, an individual with the ability to speak to the strange elemental beings that now run rampant across the Earth. Spaul crosses paths with another Apprentice, a mute woman named Pearl, who merges with Read More
Born in 1968 in Broughty Ferry, Hazel Frew is now Glasgow-based. She has published in various magazines, including Orbis, The Rialto, Poetry Scotland, Fras and New Writing Scotland. Minim is her second poetry selection to be published by the Rack Press, the first being Clockwork Scorpion in 2007. Her first full-length collection, Seahorses, was published Read More
…because he has no highfalutin song to sing, no neat message for the nation. (“Goalkeeper with Cigarette”, 1995) To open up this Simon Armitage retrospective is to delve into a treasure trove of the surreal, the unlikely, the ironic, the laugh-out-loud comic, the darkly humorous and the downright horrific. Above all, it is a delightfully Read More
Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer was born in 1901 in Czernowitz to German-speaking Jewish parents. Having studied literature and philosophy at the city’s university, she emigrated to the US in 1921 with Ignaz Ausländer, her future husband. Although she was divorced from Ausländer after only three years of marriage, she is still best known as Rose Ausländer. Read More
Reliquiæ is an annual little magazine of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art.Volume Two’s deep-green cover asks the reader to connect the book with “A tree, a rock, an embedded boulder, a ruin, a body, a hand, a passage” before opening it. These are not clearly linked objects: you can enter a ruin, Read More
Beta Life is a collection of science fiction short stories, tied together by the thread of artificial life (A-life). From body-altering nanotechnology to the future of immersive games, Beta Life explores the imaginations of over a dozen writers and scientists, each with their own unique take on the future. The opening story, Martyn Bedford’s “The Read More