© Scott Anderson © Keren Macpherson Image and poem first appeared in the exhibition, Shoulder to Shoulder, Higgins Art Gallery, Cape Cod Community College. You can hear both Anderson and Macpherson talking about their work HERE. Scott Anderson received his MFA from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1999 and has been a professor of Read More
Did I say I was never a victim? […] I helped him with good grace and inside I knew every complication I learned to lie and it was barefaced on my lies they built a civilisation (‘Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa’) Poet, and significantly translator, Sasha Dugdale’s fourth collection, Deformations, takes two important, Read More
My sharp little knife Black blooms oxidised on the blade Iron tang singing on my tongue Slitting through skin to spilled insides (‘Anaemia’) That uncompromising, but ambiguous, title primes the reader perfectly for Natalie Shaw’s debut collection. Here, I have to make a disclosure that I have met some of these poems already, sometimes at Read More
From Wiktionary: “Ekphrasis”, from Ancient Greek ἔκφρασις (ékphrasis, “description”), from ἐκφράζω (ekphrázō, “I describe”), from ἐκ (ek, “out, ex-”) + φράζω (phrázō, “I explain, point out”). Here are five pieces from a call to respond creatively to a sculpture (circa 1995) affixed very securely to a plinth in the creative writing room at Read More
I loved to watch my mother smoke. She looked like Lauren Bacall as she lifted the lighter to the cigarette that perched on her parted lips, then she’d flick the gas spark, a perfect flame igniting the crisp white tobacco paper. As she drew a long deep inhale her cheeks became concave with the power Read More
Aince upon a day my mither said to me: Dinna cleip and dinna rype And dinna tell a lee. For gin ye cleip a craw will name ye, And gin ye rype a daw will shame ye; And a snail will heeze its hornies out And hike them round and round about Gin ye tell Read More
Pedophobia – the excessive fear of children – is a staple within the horror genre, unsettling and interrogating our primal instinct towards nurturing the young. There’s the sadistic son in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, the adolescent cult in Stephen King’s Children of the Corn, or the tribal warfare of stranded schoolboys Read More
All Tied Up The rain falls in diagonal lines, bouncing off the roof of the car in continuous percussion. Water streams down the sloped driveway towards the house where the front door opens and a figure steps out. A man’s boot lands heavily in a puddle, sending water flying. “For fuck’s sake,” he exclaims eyeing Read More
Under The Weather – KT Tunstall (2004) /on homesickness I inherited my voice from my mum. On the phone, no one can tell us apart. Even my gran, her mother, used to mistake us. She would talk to me for a whole five or six minutes before asking ‘what’s Rebecca doing?’ She thought she was Read More
How do you cut into what Elizabeth Chakrabarty terms ‘the Trojan horse’ of the essay? Whether it’s lyrical, discursive, inter-medial, associative, reflective, self-reflexive, or something yet undefined, from the outset of Imagined Spaces, the form is as far from the familiar academic expectation as may be dreamt. What then is this literal try, this attempt, Read More