This year’s Illustration show is a colourful affair of books and prints interspersed with quirky objects making the discipline difficult to define. Each of this year’s graduates has created diverse portfolios showcasing a variety of skills from bookbinding and screen printing to digital drawing and ceramics. A traditional interpretation of illustration is that the artist Read More
Do you hate Mary Berry? Hate: The Game is the concept of Graphic Designer Samuel Packham. The brief, by Hasbro Games, was to “invent and design a party game for young adults that takes them away from the screen”. Samuel’s card game does just that by using edgy humour to bring 16-26 year olds together. Read More
This is the work of a life cut short. Ian Abbot died in a 1989 road accident, the year after his debut collection Avoiding the Gods was published. He was only 42. Finishing the Picture, in the words of editor Richie McCaffery, is an attempt to secure the reputation of a poet whose work has, Read More
Thomas McCarthy’s new collection Pandemonium is a war cry. Written post-economic collapse in Ireland (2008), he uses the tools of his trade to rage, amass and, ultimately, heal: (…) let pandemonium Cease, let the wild confetti of poets Be withdrawn from the bitterness of the streets. This passionate, thoughtful collection is at once a response Read More
You may not like this book at first. I didn’t. The prose is ungrammatical and sometimes incomprehensible. For instance: “he at wall. I the edge. Back to. Sheet damp.” But be patient, for these are thoughts, and thoughts don’t care about grammar. They often omit words and leave gaps, and simply splash images and emotions Read More
Although Yejide Ajayi is a confident and educated woman with her own successful business, the society that she lives in recognises only her inability to conceive a child. “Women manufacture children,” her mother-in-law reminds Yejide, “and if you can’t you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman.” Shortlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s Read More
Slender hands can’t seize chances. So much for that when we breathe the narrowed sleep of reason that bids us tend and bide a husband. Their mariners score them maps, steel-incised empiries hard and spread as their bodies. They lend us a press of wax to imprint our names, their melted flattery, gone with a Read More
Jos Smith’s Subterranea is a poetry collection of vivid illustrations for searching imaginations. The poems explore and expand, the intimate space between internal and external landscapes. While it often focuses on specific settings, the collection in its entirety is about the pilgrimage from one reality to another. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the “Subterranean” as both Read More
In a turbulent political world, where the current US administration’s denial of climate change is clear, UK-based Illinois poet Carrie Etter’s Scar seems profoundly relevant. Informed by former government climate change reports, conversations with the Met Office and interviews with her fellow Illinoisans, this single long poem explores the impact that global warming is wreaking Read More
Temples and monuments reach for transcendence, beauty lies in the carcass of an insect, cities within cities, take your eyes from the heavens, look long and deep. These words greet us at the collection’s beginning, encapsulating beautifully the essence of William Letford’s Dirt. In the eyes of many, skywards is not necessarily paired with insects Read More