The World Before Snow (Shortlisted for the 2015 T S Eliot Poetry Prize)

Tim Liardet’s The World Before Snow, his second collection to be nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, is described by Carcanet as “a book of passionate extremes.” Inspired by the poet’s chance meeting (and subsequent love affair with) an American poet after the two were trapped in a Boston museum during a snow-storm, the collection showcases the transformation and self-exploration Liardet underwent following this encounter. This is a collection of contradictions: of loose and tight images, long and short stanzas.

Jutland (Shortlisted for the 2015 T S Eliot Poetry Prize)

The Guardian Art Critic, Adrian Searle, wrote that there are many artists, “who, furrowing their brows and trying to convince us of their seriousness, aren’t half as profound or compelling.” He was referring to Turner Prize 2013 Nominee David Shrigley, but he might equally have been speaking about Selima Hill, whose latest work, Jutland includes Read More

Tomorrow Was a Montage

In-between spaces, contemplative reflection and stillness. Surrealist fantasies saturated with disorder and unreality. Tomorrow Was a Montage is a curation of works by Polish and Hungarian artists spanning across multiple generations – the result feels like a flashback from a half-remembered, vaguely unsettling dream. Timelessness implicit in the title, the worlds of animation, film posters Read More

So, So Soulful / Travelling to Utopia: With a Brief History of Technology

  Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) are a Seoul-based duo formed in 1999. Since then, American poet Marc Voge and Korean artist/translator Young Hae Chang have been producing innovative text-based animations which incorporate their signature font, Monaco. Self-described as “digital literature”, their work has been translated into over 20 languages and exhibited at both Tate London and Centre Pompidou. Their ambitious work, despite containing a Read More

Ascension

Twenty years after his last novel A Nice and Steady Job, Gregory Dowling returns to fiction writing with Ascension: a love letter to the City of Venice. Ascension follows Alvise Marangon, a young tour guide, as he offers to escort two English tourists in Eighteenth Century Venice and is then quickly embroiled in murder, conspiracies, Read More

The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs

Andrew Hussey is a professor of Cultural History at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. His latest book, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs, seems to be an extension of his previous one, Paris: The Secret History. However, this work is more overtly political as it reveals the relationship Read More

Beautiful Girls

If you keep up with magazines such as 3:AM, Under the Radar, Hearing Voices or Tears in the Fence, you may be familiar with many of Melissa Lee-Houghton’s poems in Beautiful Girls. Previously recognised in the Lupus UK Competition as well as by The New Writer Collection, Beautiful Girls is now listed as a Poetry Read More

A Bird is Not a Stone: An anthology of contemporary Palestinian Poetry

A Bird is Not a Stone is thought provoking, honest and often deeply uncomfortable. This collection was written by twenty-five of the foremost Palestinian literary voices, four of them women, perhaps a reflection of gender-based disparity existing within the country. Since the Israeli occupation, which began in 1967, Palestine is a nation besieged. The erratic construction of barriers Read More

One Still Thing

The human body is constantly changing. Capable of being strong, developing healthily through adolescence, for example, it can also weaken through illness or injury. In One Still Thing, Nell Regan’s latest poetry collection, the fluctuating fortunes of the human body is presented through the weather and different elements. These changes (from solid to water to Read More

Border Lines

Stuart Paterson is an Ayrshire-born poet writing in both English and Scots. Border Lines is his third collection, its twenty-four poems focusing on Dumfries & Galloway’s landscape and people. Beginning with a manifesto of sorts; “High Tide at Sandyhills” sees the world open up beyond the Galloway coastline, but ultimately the poet is unable or Read More