If it is true that there’s nothing new under the sun, then Harry Josephine Giles has the ability to create an utterly convincing mirage of originality by crashing old ideas into each other. Whatever you think of Deep Wheel Orcadia, it would be difficult to argue that this work could have come from a mind other than theirs.
Second Memory, a collaborative creative non-fiction pamphlet written by Pratyusha and Alycia Pirmohamed, guides you through this luminous corridor on a journey that not only traces their ancestral histories but also invites you to peer into their stories, and see yourself in them….
Eléna Rivera’s riveting collection of long poems, Epic Series, swims out into the complexities of identity, questioning what it means to be and become, to belong simultaneously to oneself and to one’s generational tree….
Motherhood, birth, and parental relationships are the three key components that make up JL Williams’ collection Origin. She explores all sides of what it means to be a mother: the pain of birth, raising a child when your own parents are absent, the fear of being in charge of another person’s life and their survival. Williams takes us into the depths of her psyche in all the stages of her pregnancy. We not only see her own fears of motherhood but our shared fears over bringing up a child in today’s society.
In a wide-ranging conversation, poet and reviewer, Beth McDonough, interviews Costa Book of the Year poet, Hannah Lowe for DURA and Imagined Spaces (www.imaginedspaces.uk) about her writing practices, about using the sonnet form, the American poets that she loves, the tension between the autobiographical and poetic form and language, and colonial history.
The Sun is Open is a poetry collection from Northern Irish poet and academic Gail McConnell. McConnell had previously published two poetry pamphlets, Fourteen (2018) and Fothermather (2019).
From the very first page which details the tragic death of McConnell’s father by a bullet in front of her three-year-old self, it is made immediately clear to the reader that this will be a difficult and confrontational read.
When a collection’s first line is ‘How did we get here?’, and that poem is called ‘When everything is water’, it’s perhaps hard for readers of a certain age not to hear an echo of Talking Heads and wonder at what is going wrong. In this time of accelerated ecological crisis the collection’s ominous title points that way too. The cover (with the poet’s beautiful photograph ‘Selkirk swimming pool in the rain’) describes how ‘we cannot imagine that the life we know is about to change in personal, political or global terms.’ …
Single Window is Daniel Sluman’s third collection. In this book-length poem, Sluman meditates on a year of his life (2016-17) when chronic illness confined he and his wife, Emily, to a sofa in their living room. Written in free verse, with powerful use of white space, the words are interlaced with photographs by Emily Brenchi-Sluman. The coupling of word and image in this work not only becomes a documentary but is a powerful nod to the shared nature of their experience.
Victoria Kennefick’s latest collection, Eat Or We Both Starve, is a considered and powerful meditation on what it means to hunger and, subsequently, to consume. Kennefick weaves historical figures, literary references and personal memories into her work in a painstaking attempt to examine hunger in its myriad forms – be it physical, sexual, relational or spiritual. At times, the poems are so interconnected in theme that the entire collection feels concentrated into one sharp burst of writing. Yet it is clear that Kennefick’s process has been refined and reoriented, as many of the poems contain a wisdom and strength – the voice of an embodied womanhood.
In Jack Underwood’s timely second poetry collection, A Year in the New Life, shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot prize, he considers his place in the world having become a father. Underwood exposes his innermost deliberations and fears, placing them within a world that is becoming increasingly alien for all of us.