“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”
[Fiction] Tall Grass — Killian Faith-Kelly
“You can be sat looking fully and utterly dead on a London train and everyone will have the good grace to leave you alone.”
[Review] Shannon Harris’s Exvangelical Reckoning and the Slow Excavation of the Self — McKenzie Watson-Fore
“For nearly two decades, Harris lived as a mannequin on display in conservative Christianity’s window. She was advertised to evangelical girls like me as the ideal”
[Fiction] Glacial Erratics — Kent Kosack
“Abel’s life has deposited him at Campland. Life, anyway. He isn’t sure if it’s his, if he must own it. He’s forty. Broke. Lives in his car. Who’d want to own that? Who’s culpable?”
[Poetry] — Caitlin Thomson
“Just because something is beautiful/doesn’t mean it should be yours”
[Poetry] — William Doreski
“Only the sea matters, heavy/with conspicuous lack of passion.”
[Poetry] — Jeff Gallagher
“Creature, I have been watching you./Through sleep and waking melded in half-closed eyes/I have been assessing your potential.”
[Fiction] Downriver — Connor Harrison
“By the time the sun was overhead, coasting on the river like coins, the Lord was sleeping again.”
[Poetry] — Erin Clark
“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.”
[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.”
[Essay] Keep Calm and Break Everything: On Peter Hanmer’s Seeking Armageddon — Archie Cornish
“How does the age of Cameronism and cupcake technopopulism relate to the right-populist reactionary politics of the present? It’s on this question that Hanmer’s work, with its teasing allegorical suggestiveness, is most thought-provoking.”
[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.”
New Critique 