“I count meself lucky. Me disposition allows is to laugh at how the landscape colours me illusions of life and me place within it. How I use them to interpret faulted interactions and what it felt like when he jumped into nothing.”
[Review] Froyo and Fragility: On Vanessa Roveto’s The Valley (a void) — Kenzy El-Mohandes
“Home and the valley become a frame of mind for Roveto’s characters, more than a specific place […] and while context evaporates, so does sanity, abstracting the scenery until it fades entirely into a hazy backdrop.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2023 — James McLoughlin
“What I often find as I make my way through the year in books is that I am prone to zig-zagging between different styles and genres. I couldn’t imagine reading the same type of book all year, even if I adored that particular type.”
[Review] TISH: Class, creativity, and inequality in British art — Kenn Taylor
“TISH is especially resonant now. But how many artists don’t get ‘rediscovered’? How much working-class creativity and history are lost?”
[Poetry] — Megan Busbice
“a door slams,/and I beg the world for something—anything—more than this.”
[Fiction] The Treacle Tree — Cathy Browne
“The treacle trees started appearing a few months after the mine dried up and whilst people would sometimes stumble on them by chance, my Dad was the only one who could sniff them out at will.”
[Drama] Pinteresque — Gregory Dally
“A horrible apartment, current times. Two squatters in limbo act out a complex loathe-hate relationship. A subset of chaos and flair, they have a highly functioning codependency.”
[Fiction] Two of You Three of Me — David Obuchowski
“What is wrong with you? Why are you like this? you demanded silently of your smudge of a reflection, but it didn’t answer. It just stood there, indistinct and wholly uninteresting.”
[Poetry] — Maya Stahler
“I watch as my mom leaves the shell in the sand /draws her mole bitten arms to herself in the water wading now /a string /of dark red wrapping down her thigh and into the foam”
[Fiction] Miscasting — Nicolas Ridley
“Suzy’s weekday life was work and friends but every evening, she would go home and wait till ten o’clock. Savouring the waiting, she told me, before lifting the receiver to make her call.”
[Essay] Moor Mother’s Scream — Hans Demeyer
“Despite its confrontational and cathartic aesthetics, Moor Mother’s music does not hold any immediate revolutionary promise. It rather makes us hear the impasse we’re in while also struggling not to be of it”
[Poetry] — Kenn Taylor
“It must have been made worse though,/having to fight your way through/those corridors clogged with/bullshitters and grifters/with the same depth as the mirror pools/outside their private schools.”
[Fiction] People Next Door — Emily Strempler
“It was a normal Tuesday night, not long past dinnertime, when the man-next-door slammed the woman-next-door’s head through the wall”
[Poetry] — Nick Power
“above him the unending star of Tesco, the/moon over Tesco;/flashes of sheet lightning that broke/the week’s heatwave ”
[Essay] The Banshees of Inisherin and the spectre of W.B. Yeats — Nora Doorley
“Little attention has been paid to the influence of W.B. Yeats on The Banshees of Inisherin, and the film’s recycling of uniquely Yeatsian themes and symbols.”
[Poetry] — Gabrielle Showalter
“here is madness, and respite/
browns and greys and greens that stain/cold-frothed foam and tangled seaweed”
[Essay] God’s Lonely Man: Martin Scorsese’s singular vision — James McLoughlin
“From the hellish red hues of Volpe Bar in Mean Streets to the confessional scene that forms part of The Irishman’s denouement, Scorsese never allows us to divorce the immorality we see on screen from the consequences to be faced.”
[Fiction] Booklice – Jon Doughboy
“But, alas, alack, your massive, yearning, ravenous lack: a stamp is only 34 cents and your pen is on fire and your heart is already bleeding not for Lyla but for the ledge she represents and the world you imagine blooming and ripe just beyond”
New Critique 