I had never left home before. Aside from holidays, I hadn’t lived anywhere that wasn’t Dundee. Last summer, I did at the age of twenty-five what most people do at eighteen; I moved to Leeds, into student accommodation for my work placement. I was forced to make a home for myself in an unfamiliar place. Read More
I was firstly struck by the cover of this rich and densely packed collection by Trinidadian writer, Nicholas Laughlin. At first glance, the cover, simple black and white, crammed with text, looks similar to an old topographical map – lines marking out regions and boundaries. A closer look at the text and an explanation at Read More
In his marvellous essay on writing about 9/11, ‘Can poetry console a grieving public?’, Mark Doty sets out the difficulties of writing about public tragedy. Can one bear witness to ‘the inchoate stuff of experience’ ─ intensely felt private pain or even anger ─ and yet also keep faith with ‘language’s project of discovering and Read More
Such men rise in the ranks and can only be removed by death or revolt … (“Candidate A”) In the 1970s, before the advent of our daily intake of internet reporting, the name Idi Amin Dada evoked a vague sense of horror too distant for the details of his reign of terror to be clear. Read More
Red peppers and plantain, hibiscus and hummingbirds, saltfish and snapper, kaiso and calypso – all feature in Malika Booker’s debut collection, Pepper Seed, as its narrative slips between Guyana, Grenada, Trinidad and Brixton to tell intertwined personal and political stories. Booker’s writing is at once both searing and beautifully lyrical, the past slipping into the Read More
The Ten Days Executive by Rhoda Bharath is a collection of short stories the quality of which came as a pleasant surprise to me. Prior to reading this collection, I had never encountered Bharath’s work and came to this review with no preconceptions. As I delved further into her writing I was struck by its Read More
The Way Home is Millicent Graham’s second poetry collection following her debut work The Damp in Things, also published by Peepal Tree Press, in June 2009. Although these collections are Graham’s only solo publications, her work has been published in a number of anthologies, the most recent of which being Yonder Awa (comprising of Scottish Read More