How to Grow Matches

Striking and direct, How To Grow Matches is a powerful addition to S.A. Leavesley’s impressive collection of poetic works and novellas. Her poetry commands attention through carefully crafted rhythm and assonance, and evocative imagery. We are exposed to a raw anger against gender stereotyping and misogyny, but which is controlled and contained in a nuanced narrative. Leavesley creates a vision where women, threatened with fading into the background, are inspired them to reclaim their space and find their own voices.

HOMELANDS: The History of a Friendship

Chitra Ramaswamy’s second book explores what home means in an individual life and the role family and language play as fundamental elements in its evolution, as much as the physical place we find ourselves living. She opens up the shifting relationships between homeland and motherland, between the actual place we are situated and an elusive sense of origin, of connection with an elsewhere which is indirect—imaginal even—tugging at the mind and heart.

Wanting: Essay Fragments (Winner of the 2022 PNR prize for Creative Essaying at the University of Dundee)

Burden Goldilocks produces prophesied curls, Snow White becomes a pearly corpse, Thumbelina never grows beyond her moniker. “What’s my name?” The Queen speaks the legendary word and Rumpelstiltskin, crooked imp, boils. Hops on stilt-thin legs, hide splitting. Repel-stilt-skin. I gobble fairy-tales like chocolates, plump with self-appointed expertise. Evil girls pretend to be princesses, masquerade as Read More

Last Harvest

From the pages of Harry Guest’s collection of poetry emerge forests, fields of grass, Norwegian fjords, and nature-dwelling creatures. The title is poignant for it reflects on relationships, the passage of time, and a sense of place. Adding to a substantial oeuvre (poetry publications, several novels, and translations from French, German, and Japanese) Last Harvest presents a retrospective view of Guest’s life as it nears its completion.

Then

Linda Black’s fourth poetry collection, Then, is a twisting and turning thread that is pulled through the layers of emotion and experience that form the fabric of life. In a stylised and sophisticated manner, yet also playful and childlike, Black manages to weave multiple incarnations of herself throughout her writing.

We Have to Leave the Earth

When a poet opens a collection quoting fellow-poet Ada Limón’s question, ‘Will you tell us the stories that make/ us uncomfortable, but not complicit?’ then already a great deal is being demanded of both the reader and of the writer.

Originally from Belfast, Carolyn Jess-Cooke now is very much part of Glasgow’s vibrant literary scene; she comes to We Have to Leave the Earth with a considerable backdrop of lived, researched and written experience. Pleasingly, her website describes her as being ‘not really bothered about genre’. That’s useful as the evidence of her ability to work beyond boundaries is clear.

Limbo

Limbo is a poetry collection by Georgi Gill, doctoral researcher in Health in Social Sciences at Edinburgh University and the inaugural Poet-in Residence at the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh. She is the editor of the web-based poetry journal, ‘The Interpreter’s House’. She states on her web site that she enjoys blending poetry with fiction and the structure of this collection certainly confirms that.

Migrations: A field study of adversity

George Lakoff writes of metaphors, understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another, that they are a form of “embodied thinking”, a discursive tool by which abstract concepts, thoughts and feelings are grasped and understood through the concrete and the everyday. Sometimes addressing traumatic events not directly, but at a slant, defamiliarizes in very insightful ways.  And so it is with Derek Robertson’s thoughtful exhibition, Migrations: A Field Study of Adversity, which employs the conceit of birds migrating—their lines of flight across borders, the dangers attendant on their journeys, their vulnerabilities, and also their will to survive against the odds – to address some of the difficult issues around the plight of refugees from which we, in our comfortable homes, might routinely avert our gaze.

Ill Feelings

In her debut book, Hattrick addresses with gusto the poorly understood condition of ME/CFS with which both she and her mother live. Her title plays on the ambiguities relating to this ‘medically unexplained’ illness, whose very labelling continues to be contentious and divisive. Hattrick unpacks the ways sufferers feel ill, but also the feelings they have about being ill and about the attitude of others towards CFS….