Honorifics (Shortlisted, Forward Prize for Best First Collection)

We have been reading Roland Barthes’ explorations of image and memory in our writing classes. Photographs record the presence of someone “that has been”, but they also express a “temporal hallucination”, like a severed limb whose presence is felt viscerally, an after effect of amputation. This return to a time past in the present moment is beautifully imagined in Honorifics. Miller is Malaysian-American now resident in Scotland, and her debut collection renders loss and separation as memorable, lingering encounters, almost hallucinatory yearnings of leaving and homecoming.

The Velvet Underground

At times harrowing, at times sweet, director Todd Haynes’ lead on this documentary film effectively recreates the sensory overload of a Velvet Underground record. Haynes’ filmography is not shy of experimental musician biopics and documentaries, including I’m Not There (2007) and Sonic Youth: Disappearer (1990). In this instance, the techniques used often submerge the viewer into the avant-garde and counter-culture lifestyles depicted for the film’s larger part to hypnotising and evocative effect.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collections of Iceland

A. Kendra Greene is no stranger to museums.  As an artist and essayist who has spent most of her career dedicated to museums, she exhibits her own work in museums, and has managed many collections in the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, and the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. She has worked herself into them and around them.  This collection of essays takes Greene far from the United States, searching the curiosities of Iceland’s isolated museums.

Islander

Until 8th September 2021Available to stream from Dundee Rep Theatre Kai Durkin Light spills from a door at the back of the stage inviting us into the theatrical space. The camera pans across a ghost light, an empty auditorium. From backstage, through the door, Bethany Tennick wheels a box onstage and begins setting up her Read More

Men Who Feed Pigeons (Shortlisted, TS Eliot Prize 2021)

Some reckon that to be competition-fit a poem requires an arresting title. With a back catalogue encompassing collection titles as extraordinary as Trembling Hearts in the Bodies of Dogs, People Who Like Meatballs and The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence, Selima Hill brims with relevant expertise. The contents list in this, her latest collection, is a poem in itself.

Poor (SHORTLISTED; FORWARD PRIZES FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION)

Caleb Femi (Penguin Poetry, 2020); pbk £9.99 The North Peckham Estate, where Caleb Femi’s Forward shortlisted debut collection is set, is infamous for containing the stairwell in which Damilola Taylor died. And yes, death stalks these pages, those streets, as do rage and despair… but so too do love, imagination, defiance. Here is a voice Read More

The Untethered Space

How does one cope with the enormity of losing all four siblings to cancer? In the preface to Carol A Caffrey’s poignant debut collection, The Untethered Space, she writes, ‘I turned to poetry […] to exhale the heavy burden of grief that weighed on me’. She goes on to extend an invitation, ‘pull up a chair and join me at the table.’ We accept, tentatively, in an expectation that is sure to tether reader and poet as we explore the meaning of grief in all of its guises.