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
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
Ned Denny is a London-born author/critic whose work has been published in various magazines and publications along. Unearthly Toys: Poems and Masks combines his previous work with a large number of new poems to comprise a very diverse and eclectic book. Spread throughout the collection are many poems that are directly inspired by, or are Read More
In a remarkable extension of thought, The Book of the Peony buds, expands and lets fall astounding petals: prose poems and haiku invoking an infinite, unattainable peony. The peony is allegorical. It is approached with the mind. It is the illusory peony of separation, of birth and death. Or, it is the shimmering unity beyond Read More
Phoebe Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria beckons to the wayfarers. An amalgamation of poetry and prose, the collection is a seamless combination of imagery and narration. With its vocal fragments and lyricism, it is both political and perspicacious. Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria reads like the “humming” of a relic folk tune, remembered, re-sung, and Read More
displays of pride, the concupiscent eye bent inward w/ súch deep longing. When readers omit a poem’s title, I’m perturbed. Poets fret over titles. Not just their wording. Should it hold to the left, be centred? Capitalisation? If there is superscription, are italics necessary? Are endnotes too hidden? Are footnotes overly close and distracting? Don’t Read More
The great Gaius Valerius Catullus lived, loved and died in northern Italy around the time of Julius Caesar and Cicero. Not much is known about him other than what can be gleaned from his poems, for example, that he had a great fondness of kissing: Give me a thousand kisses, then one hundred, then a Read More