“Drawn as much from fiction as it is from fact,/Olaus Magnus, court cartographer’s chart/is a land known less by head than heart/pulsing with legend, lake, steppe, pact.”
Category: Poetry & Fiction
[Review] Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín and Other Poems by Oisín Breen — Daunish Negargar
“Breen imbues the mundanity of everyday life with mysticism and grandeur with these joyous poems, firmly rooted in both the aged bark of the yew, and the pure milk of the word.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2022 — James McLoughlin
“I realised this year that, for all that literature can be a great escape from the drudgery and occasional trauma of life, it’s easy to get swept up in the drama of the everyday and forget the balm that great fiction can bring.”
[Poetry] – S.C. Flynn
“As I walk towards the distant sea,/each stranded invertebrate becomes a spineless decision/pecked at constantly by the flashing beaks of gulls”
[Poetry] — Tom Holmes
“The Aurora Borealis arched over Lemaîtreville./Clocks spiraled. The town tree grew an inch.”
[Poetry] — Christopher Linforth
“Questions should be avoided/about the terms of the will/and whether cremation or internment/is the preferred state for his body./Unless, of course, he was into that.”
[Poetry] — William Snelling
“At breakfast, we heard the barely hoped-for words,/‘don’t bother going in, it might reach thirty…’/From then the day stretched out like low tide,/so low you thought you could stroll to France.”
[Poetry] — Oisín Breen
“So it is that we end here, instead,/In autumn, when youth relents,/In the face of lasting death,/And birthing begins”
[Poetry] — Eric Nicholson
“I’ve only inherited a few mementos:/a Brownie camera, poetry and an OS Map/which unfolds to cover my carpet/like a time-lapse film/of a bud bursting into leaf.”
[Fiction] Hinterkaifeck — Eitan Benzion
“These are the timekeeping regulars for this stretch of road, grains in the hourglass, springs in the watch.”
[Fiction] Summers — Maria Schiza
“The summer had ebbed away into autumn and there were no warning signs, although if there were, I failed to see them, and the fact of it was what remained.”
[Poetry] — John Moessner
“Maybe clapping is the remnant of a desperate act/of early humans, drought-worn and itching/for a salve-a storm- inviting it by calling its name”
[Poetry] — Jorge López Llorente
“No, the new heat death from textbooks,/
rather than that intangible entropy,/
arrives – literal, not paradoxical;/
on trees, not paper; cold-blooded, not cold”
[Poetry] — Raymond Miller
“Discovered letters she once wrote/in that unsteady girlish hand;/unsheathe each from its envelope,/ignore the cracking of his throat/for he would not be thought unmanned.”
[Poetry] — Ethan Turner
“I listen to music and I watch sports and I read books and/I’m a bystander in this world.”
[Poetry] — Michael Sutton
“Looking from the pavement into a star starved sky I slither./
The car which from distance seemed blanketed kitschly in leaves/
I soon see bashed with slate and bricks felled by night winds.”
[Essay] A Historical Fiction — Stephanie Limb
“I feel a pleasure similar to Lisa Robertson’s when I read historical fiction. Maybe Cusk is right. Maybe it is pornography; maybe that’s why I like it.”
[Poetry] — Jane Zwart
“forgetting/pushes before it, like a wave, like a broom,/the premonition of loss.”
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