Etch To Their Own is a (now defunct) literary newsletter I sent to you on a Friday. It’s written in TinyLetter (sign up here, although it’s a bit late now), and is hosted on the Etch To Their Own Medium page later in the week.
Etch To Their Own ran for over two years now. Originally conceived as a way to stop my brain from running out of my ears by exercising a few critical muscles, it ran to 120+ issues and includes book reviews and even the occasional interview.
I only have a small subscriber list, but invite and receive many responses to each newsletter. Every single response was momentarily cherished, greedily consumed, and slowly replied to.
If you have something you think would have fitted ETTO, please feel free to get in touch on Twitter to discuss what it is and why I will like it. DMs are always open.
Love, Bring Myself
For the month of April, which is national poetry month somewhere, I am exchanging poems with a friend every day, using a little of the previous poem in the next. This means sometimes using odd automatic or found-text style tricks like using translation tools, or breaking up a line and writing out from each. The…
Another last day
Another Last Day by Alex Lemon is a kind of self-apocalypse in a way we’re all familiar with — the sense that yes, this is all going to end and there’s not much to do about it, so taking an affirmative stance on the end of the world is the closest thing to satisfying control we can…
On Being Grateful, Delayed
I have been feeling particularly full of life this week, and very grateful for it. You can come across some good luck and find yourself being suspicious about enjoying it or acting on it, but I am glad that I have people around me who gently guide me back to more gentle places in my…
Make Believe
Judson Hamilton’s The New Make Believe from Dostoyevsky Wannabe mixes odd, meaningful places with crunchy names and concepts with a shrugging kind of onlineness that drives his own romantic and spiritual life — Pisa, the first from the collection opens as it intends to continue: The disdain or wilful ignorance for the monumental happenings around him are…
If I am not Mistaken
I found this week’s story through someone looking for an em dash. Mistaken, by Kaj Tanaka, in pidgeonholes is an odd surrealist piece. Here’s a snippet from the start: Read the whole thing to explore its shifting sense of person. In my first reading of it I felt it had a theme of dementia running…
I have run out of compassion for wolves
If My Body Could Speak by Blythe Baird, published by Button Poetry is an exploration of eating disorders, sexuality, and coming of age. The collection is one about the female body as a public space. The body here for Blythe is a negotiated space between almost anyone but her — her school, her father, boys at school,…
Is that found material?
Lydia Davis talks about her writing in the Paris Review, and how her work consists now of mostly found material. She explores how there is a line just beyond presenting “real life” which is a bit Schrodinger cat in that almost anything for her that is observed is “found” and therefore fiction — i.e. there’s nothing that…
We huddled in the breath of our willful ignorance
Tommy Dean’s When the Water’s Came in CX is an apocalyptic flash fiction with the same vitriolic energy as a Henry Rollins spiel. It uses an increasing invective that brings its anger at those who came before with it. The threat here has come into being because nothing has been done, and nothing continues to…
Horse Latitudes
Sometimes poetry is about expressing simple things, like the inexpressible nuances of different kinds of love. Blythe Baird’s What I Couldn’t Explain Via Text is an example of that: Explaining unexplainable feelings is always like an exercise in black out poetry — it’s the suggestion of things that aren’t, the negative space of it, that starts to…
The Mothnan Prophecies
Please note, this is a little spoilery. The book is full of tonal reveals I discuss, even if I have avoided some of the plot points you will encounter. Falling into madness is difficult to express for protagonists. On the one hand you’re telling the story, so you have to be able to convey it to…
In Reprose
I love prose poetry. Our expectations are set very differently. Like flash fiction, we expect to be taken to the centre of an event very quickly. Unlike flash, in which we give room for unfinished moments being displayed, and short stories, where we demand something similar to a beginning middle and end, prose poetry has…
Adventures in
Poemland, by Chelsey Minnis, is book length, sparse, musing on what poetry is at all. You can see the declarative style that developed into last year’s Baby I Don’t Care — but this earlier work has a grappling feeling of trying to define something elusive (rather than flipping spotlights onto the space between two people). So what…
A Feeling Artist
Feelings. We’ve all had them. Lincoln Mitchell’s A Feeling Artist does something to skewer the (often) skewered humanities in a way that we can all enjoy. Pitching a world where feelings are art and that there are people who perform emotions for crowds to react to. It’s an argument for theatrical catharsis on the scale…
Flirtations
Salo Press has recently started a chapbook series deliciously named The Flirtations. Descansos, by Katherine Osborne is the second flirtation. It is a collection of poems that thread declaratives, dialogue and ominous pseudo-mythic pronouncements to build a kind of stream-of-consciousness from inside the witch’s cauldron. Like all poetry, a lot of it is about setting boundaries as…
What Rough Beast Slouches Toward Year End?
In the no-mans land of the christmas-to-new-year period, time begins to lose all meaning. So much so that if you were to plan to write a newsletter on a Friday, rounding up your year of reading, that you might misplace that Friday and double-park it with a Saturday. This is the second year of Etch To…
When I Said I’d Even Eat Your Baby Fat
I’ve been spending some time with Kaveh Akbar this week. I usually pick at whatever he has out there in the world, but I’ve finally dived into Calling a Wolf a Wolf after buying it for a friend (and buying myself a copy, of course). The collection explores Kaveh’s escape form addiction, and as such has…
In a Jumble
I’m a little late this week, I’ll blame that on the season. Here’s a few things I enjoyed this week. Paige Lewis has a slice of her longer poem in Poetry this week. It covers the story of Yael, a classic revengeful woman in Jewish storytelling who brings an enemy into her tent to lull…
Bottled G
Bottled Goods by Sophie Van Llewyn is a “novella in flash” about life under the watchful eye of the secret police in communist Romania. Last week I shared Sophie’ article on the “novel in flash” as a form. I’m not completely convinced that it is an entirely different form from say, a novella that happens…
New Flash
Enjoy this little flash, Crazy Bears published by the always wonderful Spelk Fiction, by Kapka Nilan. It’s easy to see how this story could spin out into everything else. I think that’s what I like most about flash fiction, the suggestion that there is more — a connecting cosmos of people, feeling and moment. Here we are…
Wake up
Juila Armfield’s The Great Awake, from issue 23 of The White Review is a story of misplaced desires, and an incredible personification of sleep. Sleep begin appearing to people, strange quiet wraiths, little ghosts that spend their time in your presence, but don’t necessarily interrupt. A hovering concept that now fills a space as a…
Plow Your Bones
Olga Tokarczuk’s extremely metal titled Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is a murder mystery of sorts. Set in a remote Polish village on the boarder of the Czech Republic, atop a plateau, it fairly gently presents a string of bodies to our hero — Janina an old woman whose understanding of the fates…
Baby, I Don’t Care
I have returned to Chelsey Minnis this week, to give her some more attention than I did while at a wedding. Baby, I Don’t Care is one of the best books of poetry I have read this year. It’s completely of itself and feels a little like a self-help guide. Chelsey created the book by ambiently…
More Than Wild
Wilder, by Claire Wahmanholm, is a poetry collection of post-civilisation world-building where all agency is removed from the survivors. The poems are glimpsed out of an incomplete view of the world (there isn’t a complete world to view anymore) and fragments (which have a little bit of an intentionally fragmented Sappho about them). This view…
In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo
Mathias Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants is a kind of tragic farce of stuff. The story is one of Michelangelo, yes, that one, and his trip to Constantinople at the request of the Sultan to design him a glorious bridge. The sculptor feels rejected by the pope and overlooked by his people — so…
Propositioning
Dear reader, I am writing this to you from a wedding of one of my oldest friends. As such, it will be short. You will probably have seen this explode over your tweet feed, but there is an incredible interview with Chelsey Minnis. Emily Berry discusses the ins and outs of Chelsey’s work here. There…
Freshening Up
This week I have been particularly interested in Rachel Khong’s The Freshening, published in The Paris Review. It’s a sci-fi tale of Americans vaccinating themselves against race. The Freshening itself in the story is an event where government agents visit your home and inject you with a serum which changes the way you see the…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, before
This week I have been spending most of my reading in Poetry and Poetry Review — the poetry magazines for people who like others to know its poetry they’re reading. Donika Kelly in Poetry offers us Dear- which you can read in full here, or below: (Big fan of whoever at the Poetry Foundation decided to include…
That if it weren’t for the poems lifting you up
Rosebud Ben-Oni’s recent column in Kenyon Review uses the idea of a “conscious poem” — a poem that knows it exists to ask questions about how poetry comes into existence at all. When is a poem a poem? When you finish writing the last line, the first draft, the first word, the thought, the feeling of the…
How Can A Book Read Another Book?
Letters from Max, published by Milkweed, is an incredible expression of grace. The shared correspondence between Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo is a moving portrait of not just how writers sharing their work and lives with one another as a community of craft building, but also how the writers become the text for one another. Max…
The Superior Form
It has been a busy week where I, dear reader, have not been reading enough. This is bracket week, where I tell you things between brackets instead of a proper close reading/jolly jaunt into literary wheat fields. I am currently working through the Tor.com book (which is excellent, I am particularly enjoying The Water That…
School Of Rocks
This week is only a short missive of literary love to you all because I am a tired boy in a tired land. The things that are not worn out are soon to be and those that are worn are soon not to be at all. My recent poetry practice has involved this “searching for a…
Taking a Walk
Mark Goodwin’s Steps is a collection to be envious of. If you’ve ever tried to write about a walk you have been on that really captures the sense of narrative you feel while on it, and failed, you will also share this feeling. The collection is one of purposeful walking in Wales, England, Spain, Ethiopia. What…
Look, we are not unspectacular things
Ada Limon’s The Carrying is a poetry collection of wanting and possession. Major themes of her childlessness and the desire for absent men, plants, life, carry through every poem. There is deft control here, nature is evoked, but it is gardened, it is wild but not hungry like a wolf, more like the strains of…
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Years
Annie Earnaux’s memoir is a strange memory-object to contend with. It recounts the years of her life between birth and now in a broad and structural way that is deeply familiar. This familiarity comes from the years in question being those lived by baby boomers, probably the most culturally over-represented epoch of civilisation for a…
For You In The Dark. Never Ask For Proof.
I was very kindly sent a copy of Nu-Lit’s Micro/Macro zine some weeks ago, and I managed to spend some time with it today. The zine is one that showcases these very small texts, often in the context of an image. Here’s a favourite, by j.holth: or this by Heather Ash: Or this by Maynard: It’s interesting…
Million Pounds Of Clouds
I come to your table and tell you that this week’s newsletter will be tapas style. You ask if it if going to be in a Catalan, Valencian or Galician style — because these are what you would expect when your waiter says such things. You’re a little surprised, it wasn’t a tapas bar last week. No,…
When My Heart Stops, It Will Be The End Of Certain Things
Returning to a sadly departed talent, I have been enjoying Max Ritvo’s upcomming posthumous The Final Voicemails. Edited by Louise Glück and published by Milkweed Editions, this is a tender collection of poetry that move in and out of focus around the end of his life. Endlessly shifting between the pain of existing in a body…
In The Beginning
Note: I am quoting from an advance copy of the book, and the final version may contain changes. I’d also like to mention that I will be lightly spoiling this very ancient text — I enjoyed a great deal of it because I had no idea what would be happening next. We’re all looking for an audience — someone to…
Burn It All Down
Erin Hoover’s Barnburner starts with an epigraph that seems destructive: But in reality is a bold statement of wanting wholeness and truth in life. Through this collection of poetry that feels like it pulls a lot from memoir writing — that confessional, confiding tone that’s designed to pull you in like a close friend — we’re convinced the barn…
Maybe our most real timeline resides in another verb tense
Our favourite horse poet, Rosebud Ben-Oni, is back at not exactly talking about horses again with Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation. Listen and read the full poem here (it really is worth listening to the whole thing if only for the “he and I are doing a lot of simulated things.…
From A Feeld In Eng-er-land
Feeld, a new poetry collection from Jos Charles, is a strange wandering series of connecting poems. Focusing on ideas of identity and trauma for the trans poet — placing herself as a hypothetical horse (saddled, broken) in a field which we will have the run of for the connected poems. The feeld itself is one that we…
Blacking Out
Bristol, a collection of poetry and experimental prose edited by Paul Hawkins (who publishes our buddy Hiromi Suzuki) includes the kind of formal play we live for over here at ETTO. David Turner offers us satirical glances at Turner prize winners and their work going slightly wrong (Hirst shouting “Flatten its snout and bang a…
Sweet Spoonfuls of Nothing
Nutella, the modernist’s spread, can be served many ways — but we know the canonical Nutella delivery system is the spoon. Yes, you can put it on other things, but it’s the individual servings taken from the whole in the jar which deliver the individual half-quenelle of sweetness. Which I suppose is why Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s book is…
Foam of Sadness
I’ve spent the last week crawling over the coastline of Wales on bicycles, in suits, and with beers in hands. I did manage to do a little reading for you all however, in between the usual holiday blur. But rather than give you something I’ve read over this last week, I think I would prefer…
Other Womaning
Lorrie Moore’s How to Be an Other Woman, from her collection Self-Help is a instructive-styled short story in which the protagonist struggles with becoming the role. While it seems that it is easy enough to do — fall in love with a stranger who seems in control of their world, discover afterwards that you have become an…
It’s No Good
I have had the pleasure of reading Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good — a collection of free verse poetry and essays from what some term the Russian Bukowski. Medevedev’s poetry does have something of Bukowski about it, the muckiness, the poverty, the lines that seem like he’s looked up from the paper to swear at someone in…
Returning To The Logbook
This week we’re returning to our old friend Hiromi Suzuki, who has recently released logbook. logbook fits with a tradition of artists and poets making collage books as a meditative activity. This differs from the usual way we look at a book, instead of simply being the vehicle for the poems or text, the books…
Nice
I am reading at a wedding later this month, and was asked to pick a poem. It turns out that this is surprisingly difficult, despite the endless pool of poetry about love and devotion that we regularly paddle in round these parts. We ended up stewing in a pile of books spread across the floor, every…
Ghost Hotline
When reading and relaying something about Anne Carson, there’s an urge to simply say: yes, it is her, more of her, in the way you expect tickling the same parts of your brain. With issue two of The Well Review (which is very good in itself) came with a lovingly put together pamphlet by Anne Carson.…
Books Away From Home
This week’s ETTO is being drafted in the tiny terrible seats of a Ryanair flight to the wonderful city of Berlin. As such I can’t offer much in the way of close reading, but I thought I would see what I can come up with in airplane mode. I was thinking about books away from home,…
Cove
I paddled through Cove by Cynan Jones this week. It’s a joyously short (some 90 pages book brought to us by Granta. I may have said this one hundred times before — but if you’re writing a novel, please make it the shortest best thing you can, for my sake. The story follows a man taking his…
Bee Wolves & Godlike Distance
Paige Lewis offers us this in the Rumpus: It’s Hard To Enjoy The Stars When You Don’t Trust Your Neighbours The poem takes us from the difficulty of observing something grand — stargazing — to the ease at which we flip ourselves into positions of power. While she compares the flooding of millipedes — her own godlike act — to the man who invents…
girls too proud to climb trees
It being a bank holiday in the UK means that the world is off-kilter, every day for the next four will feel like one smeared Sunday, and the only thing you’re sure of is that you’re probably going to overindulge somehow. As such, ETTO is a little fragmented today. Cathy Ulrich has, again, an excellent…
just two future corpses, about to fall in love
With a perfect balance of darkness, silliness and threat, we have Elisabeth Ingram Wallace’s Our Black Comedy. The piece has a kind of roving-eye view of a long relationship, dipping in and out of small, tender moments of memory to build into a larger image and a shared framework of understanding. You can read all…
Flights of Fancy
As you may have guessed from the stream of snippets that I have been throwing out on twitter, this week’s ETTO focuses on Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I picked it up last week from the pile where it had been whimpering, and the next thing I know, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker International…
On Violence
On Violence, an anthology of short stories, poetry, experimental prose and essays, provides an exquisite variety gallery of violence while also carefully negotiating a way through each display with deft context and balance. The collection is impossibly well put together by Sharon Kivland and Rebecca Jagoe and the balance of pieces that really gouge at…
When Every Single Truth Was Known
Facial Recognition by Rana Dasgupta is a collection of vignettes from a world where widespread facial recognition, surveillance and the accompanying replacement of humanity is explored. Clay implants into the face are used to avoid detection by facial recognition machines — the idea being that you could mould your face to avoid the cameras and detection. Later…
Much like god in the end.
This week, I have been reading Lynn Mitchell’s The Red Beach Hut as a kind of palate cleanser to last week’s Amygdalatropolis. Last week’s novel did leave me kind of ruined by the absolute outpouring of filth that seemed deeply real — because everything/nothing is real/matters, the context dies and so does any way of rationalising it. It…
Nothing You Do Will Have Any Effect On The Game
Note: this book is pretty rough. I felt like someone had driven a truck through my brain, in a bad way, after reading it in one sitting. It contains mentions of suicide, self-harm, sexual violence, gore and so on. The review to follow reflects that while trying to stay as polite as possible, but do…
Undone, I’ve Made Today Warm
Earlier this month I had to buy a specific issue of Poetry so that I could read You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm in it’s full fold-out glory. I originally heard Paige Lewis read it on the Poetry Magazine Podcast, where it is explained that the poem is laid out to…
After the world ends, you are going to fall in love again
Notes toward an elegy, or what the books were for by Hannah Aizenman is a kind of broken-back poem, where the second verse leads us between the first and last through a wandering definition. The first verse tells us that the books were for storing themselves, because they had their words stolen from them by…
Holiday to Hell
This week I picked up my complete collection of William Blake and started looking for hell. I’ve been having a little wander round the idea of evil recently, thinking initially that finding a satisfying definition would be easy. The simplest version is that it is an absence of good, or simply to be bad. Both…
Canon, Liberated
Liberating The Cannon, a new anthology edited by Isabel Waidner and published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe (under their Experimental mark) sets out to present the intersection of queer experience and experimental writing. The anthology takes its first cue from classism throughout, presenting experimental and literary work that deals with working-class culture at the same time as…
Bluebeard’s Omelette
I once watched a TV show about doctors, GPs, meeting their patients, filmed in the fly-on-the-wall style. It was supposed to show the real interactions between them, and give us a secret insight into the way doctors have to operate. Of course, it was designed to also show off the patients with humorous us approaches…
Thanks for reading, it’s really helping
This week is the full-year issue of Etch To Their Own. I’m really glad that I’ve managed to keep this going for so long, and that there seems to be a number of you actually reading it. Making it public and regular was one of the main focuses of the newsletter, a way to make me…
Two Thousand And Seventeen Etches
I am going to write the first part of this week’s ETTO from memory. Rather than a “best of 2017” list, it’s just those parts that really caught the hangnail of my soul as I flicked pages. This, I suppose, is the list of things that will get added to the easily accessible part of…
A little sad thing that doesn’t reveal itself
This evening I am being quick because I have to enjoy the party season and then climb on to a plane to take me to the rolling graveyards of Lisbon and Porto. Enjoy what has been an extremely good week for short poems and flash fiction. NOTE: the party season was so good I forgot…
A Project For A Trip
I have been away this week, which usually means I get to do a lot of reading. Sadly, Lison and Porto are full of interesting things, so I found barely any time for it. The one thing I did read at any length was some Susan Sontag, a collection of short stories bought from the bookshop…
I’d just like to point out there is no such thing as absolute identity through time
Before we go anywhere, I’d just like to point out there is no such thing as absolute identity through time. Which apart from just sounding good, I feel is entirely true. Raymond Ruyer, the chap who said the above also contributed to the concept of panpsychism which is the idea that all matter has consciousness,…
The Long & Short Of It
This week we start with an extreme religious experience with, er, Religious Experience by Paul Luikart in Wiskey Paper: Quite unusually, I am able to show you all of something this week. There is an obvious magic to this lovely blast of flash. The story of a man lost in the desert, who in his…
I Guess We’ll Have to Be Secretly in Love with Each Other
Rosebud Ben-Oni provides us with a little equine bonding in I Guess We’ll Have to be Secretly in Love with Each Other & Leave it at That in Frontier Poetry. Here’s snippet of the rich, giving, lyrical rush of it: The poem is an arguement, a betrayal and then the justification of that betrayal because of…
This World Is Full Of Monsters, and We’re Fine Thanks
The biggest thing from this week is This World Is Full Of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s an abstract story of a metamorphosis forced upon our protagonist unwillingly. There is a story on the doorstep, abandoned, orphaned — that is taken in. And like any small story, there’s a desire to nurture it. But this isn’t just…
Please Don’t Wait Too Long
This might be another sad one today, so I apologise. It’s not a sad because of the publication in print of a non-fiction piece I wrote about writing eulogies in the excellent The Creative Truth. It’s sad for entirely another reason. We’ll come to that later. If you have ever run a large enough website,…
Dustsceawung
Do you pick up stray books? If you saw a book unaccompanied on a bus, lonely, lost, would you take it home or would you hand it in? Rajat Singh talks about “books out of place” in The Millions this week. The obsession with picking up good books that need a home is familiar to…
A Doll’s Dictionary
This week has been lovingly consumed by Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet. A collection of short stories with a series of re-articulated and grotesque motifs concerning the strangeness of bodies, sewing machines and unappealing tinned food, and odd systems of oppressive society. The stories feature characters who accept the world as it exists for them,…
Theophany: I ask god to slide into my head quickly before I do
Hello, have you ever considered letting god into your life? What about just one of the Greek ones turning up? They used to do it a lot, but I guess they don’t get out so much any more. Today is Philip Whalen’s birthday, or would be if he were still alive. To celebrate, let’s take…
The Helpful Dead
Following on, it seems, directly from last week’s ETTO about having some time off to be dead, we have this by Leila Chatti: Leila uses the structure of the poem to undercut initially presented meanings — “she fishes the black tongue” sounds portentous, until it is recontextualised into the sock. “Slipping coins in the mouth” references the…
Lazarus’ Lovely Red Gloves
During a moment of quiet in a Northampton chain pub I found this poem by Martin Glaz Serup on the Zeno Press site. Here’s a little snippet: The poem is a kind of jaded Lazarus poem — a wish-thinking of not only coming back from the dead, but being dead in the first place, and how that…
Maybe an eyeroll is the closest I get to God most days
Here’s an excellently titled piece in Tinderbox by Stevie Edwards: Poem in Which My Student Writes Me to Explain that There Are More of Him, that He Is Not the Only One Who Is Offended by Feminists Enjoy: I like the way this one kind of slips off the page, it’s a detatched smearing of…
Visions of Miami
This week has been filled with me dipping in and out of A Vision. It’s something I should have read a long time ago, rather than just reading about — because it is entirely bonkers. A Vision is the philosophical/metaphysical work of W B Yeats that he put together while experimenting with automatic writing. It’s where his…
What We Learnt At The Oxford Print Fair
Three weeks later and we have to call the Oxford Print Fair a success. With 900 people through the door (that we managed to count), 20 happy sellers, one happy gallery, an extremely busy coffee shop and leaving Oxford a little bit more full of print it is easy to say it went well! a…
I Spy With My Iris
I had a lovely time at the print fair last weekend (I’m the tall one trying to not get in the way too much, but still a little bit). Not only was there loads of artists and printmakers in the sense that you might expect, but there was also Hurst Street Press — a publisher of innovative…
Passing Sentence
I very happily spotted a few Fitzcarraldo Editions’ books out in the wild this weekend. There’s something very pleasing about a publishing house with such a high hit rate (for me) that I can generally trust that anything white on blue will be of interest. So I picked up Zone by Mathias Énard, which consists…
Static
This week has been a little light on my eyes running up and down some poetry. The best thing I’ve read this week has been a dear friend’s dissertation for their MA, but I’ve missed out on the good going on in the world of literature. But, that said, I did see this in Rust…
The Oxford Print Fair & Getting Your Assets In Gear
This weekend is Mogul’s first event. In partnership with Forecast Events we have brought the incredibly successful Manchester Print Fair (save the date!) to Oxford. On Saturday the 9th September, at 10am we open the doors of The Yard at Modern Art Oxford and let the public in to meet and buy from 20 printmakers.…
A Process To Kill Doubt
Richard Clarkson Studio Most of the time, it’s easy making business decisions. It can come down to what will make you the most money, give the company the most value, or provide a set of improvements across the board that just has to help somebody. But then there are the tricky decisions too — the ones you put…
Understanding The Blueprints
I got very excited when I read Nicole McCarthy’s poem featured in The Shallow Ends yesterday. Aside from it being a visual poem, it’s also bold and allows re-approach and reconsideration, it’s called [i miscarried a watermelon] and here it is: We can compare the rigid structure of the building design, blueprint, with the rigidity…
Falling Backwards
I spent a small amount of time with a section from Anais Duplan’s Mount Carmel and The Blood of Parnassus. And I wanted to look at this, and unpick a little of what makes it real — and how it, and works like it, deal with transition and metamorphosis. I think in this snippet we’re brought in…
Grand Designs
I’ve spent my free time this week round Omar Sakr’s house. I mean, not literally, but metaphysically. These Wild Houses is a poetry collection that plays with location and identity, and the metaphor of the house — the home — as a person, a body. Omar invites us into his house with the banalities of domestic decoration — setting out these…
what it means to survive if you have to eat others to do it
So it seems like GIVING GODHEAD by Dylan Krieger might be in contention for the best thing of 2017, according to Thomas Simmons of the Boston Review at least. I have to admit, I didn’t know there was collection to be had until today. We’ve seen Dylan before, with her powerful rush of language. It…
30 Days of Mogul
I joined Mogul officially on the 3rd of July 2017, buying in to the business, taking a 40% stake, and saying farewell to the safety of my long term employer. Here’s a little bit of what it’s been like. I have worked with Mogul before in a freelance capacity — at first just helping out a friend,…
and I give my breath to a small bird-shaped pipe
Max Ritvo died one year ago this month. A poet who went to Yale, and continued his work after in an MFA knowing that his life would be shortened by bone cancer, died on August 23rd last year. His poems are filled with direct and life-giving imagery, even this — Afternoon, which starts with the line “When…
Pain In Perspective
This week we have Eula Biss’s prose-poem-essay on pain, called The Pain Scale, which you can find a direct link to here. I felt really lucky to find this as it articulates everything I’ve ever wondered about pain in the context of medicine. She articulates ideas about those questions about pain you get from doctors…
Nude Poetry — Here Is What I Forgot
This week Kaveh pointed out that it was Tintern Abbey day, to barely no fanfare. It’s an abbey I visited last year, and completely forgot the poem in the presence of. I couldn’t even string the opening verse for my cycling friends who were so desperate for a bit of culture during their break from…
Ritually Speaking
C A Conrad is a poet whose work caught me from the first page of a book I picked up in the excellent English language bookshop, St George’s, in Berlin. I briefly exchanged emails with him over whether he was ever going to get around to recording a reading of the entirety of The Book…
NOTES ON: C A CONRAD “THE BOOK OF FRANK”
This is a copy of something I wrote in 2011, that should probably be lost to the mists of time. And yet, here I am publishing it again. Take with youthful salt. Poetry has to grab me these days. I have to instantly interested, a turn of phrase is all that’s needed to draw me…
Kids, These Days
This last week we’ve been blessed with a short story from J A Field: People Are Everywhere. It concerns that kind of quiet neurosis, restraint and internal retellings you see in a certain kind of modernish novel, something like that looming threat and self doubt undercut by absurdity It’s the kind of middle-class/first-world concern that…
The Heat & The Hum
This week we’re kicking off with a poem from the upcoming chapbook from Spencer Williams, called ALIEN PINK, which can be pre-ordered over here at The Atlas Review store. Here’s literally the only snippet I can find of SPRING: I actually don’t know if it continues from this point on, or ends there. It’s enough…
Absent Motormen On Their Way Home
This week has been dominated by a couple of re-readings of Motorman by David Ohle. Motorman is one of those books that really attempts to push against the boundaries of accepted language as a sort of political act. To resist by taking apart the safe language we use every day that acts as a confinement…
Owls & Hawks
As always, when politics get in the way of people’s lives they become confused and stop talking about important things like poetry, and instead, pretend to have an opinion on boring an unimportant aspects of life, like economics and long term survival of the nation-state in which they reside. But still, there has been a few…
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