The intriguing title of Vahni Capildeo’s exquisite collection, Venus as a Bear, promises a kind of transformational prose, a mish-mash of animal and myth, of the ordinary and the extraordinary – and it surely delivers. A winner of the 2016 Forward Poetry Prize, Capildeo is undoubtedly a worthy contender for this year’s prize. Capildeo’s verse Read More
Kaveh Akbar’s poetry is captivating not only for its beautiful turn of phrases but also for its more profound musings in evocative lines that linger: “eternity looms/ in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap”. Yet Calling a Wolf a Wolf isn’t simply a sum Read More
Abigail Parry’s debut collection Jinx is an exercise in sleight of hand, it’s a trick. Parry weaves the familiar elements of nursery rhymes and folktales with darker themes of sex, death and guilt into an uncomfortable combination that plays with readers’ expectations. She borrows characters and stories from those sharp-edged fairy tales with undercurrents of Read More
Shivanee Ramlochan is a jack-of-all-trades. She is an arts reporter, book blogger, editor and reviewer for The Caribbean Review of Books, and a poet living in her native Trinidad. Her first collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, opens with a poem entitled “A Nursery of Gods for My Half White Child”, introducing us to Read More
The MFA in Arts and Humanities is an interdisciplinary degree that gives students an opportunity to combine their studio practice with a wide range of humanities subjects, such as English, Culture and Society, Philosophy, Film Studies and Gender Studies. The synthesis of ideas has resulted in a breathtaking show. It’s quite a challenge to hike through the Crawford Building to find the exhibits, Read More
Part of the undoubted charm of the longstanding Pittenweem Arts Festival is discovering art in a huge variety of unexpected venues. In many cases the art is enhanced by its setting in what are normally domestic or commercial interiors. Add in the possibility of enjoying a lobster roll beside the harbour to sustain you between Read More
Two naked black men, one lifted up by a balloon, the other letting go of him. This stunning image on the front cover is intensified by a photograph of the poet on the back cover – Danez Smith, a black, gay, HIV-positive, queer slam poet from Minnesota. Don’t Call Us Dead has been shortlisted for Read More
Richard Scott’s first collection, Soho, is an uncompromising portrayal of life as a queer man, in a modern queer community. Intense and intimate, the collection is split into four parts, each focusing on a different aspect of Scott’s queer experience: violence, love, shame and community – though elements of each of these themes run through Read More
Assurances surely feels like the book J.O. Morgan was born to write, drawn as it is from his father’s work as an R.A.F officer maintaining the Airborne Nuclear Deterrent during the Cold War. Morgan’s poetry is widely recognised as being outstanding, original and this is his sixth book-length poem. What might seem a chilling subject Read More
Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born artist based in Mexico with a long-term interest in the current affairs of the Middle East. Knots’n Dust has been organized by the Beirut Art Centre and was on display in Lebanon in spring this year. Through animation, drawings, paintings and sculpture, Alÿs explores two themes ‒ the complexities of knots Read More