-Reviewed by Keiran Goddard- First things first … Leah Umansky’s Mad Men inspired pamphlet, Don Dreams and I Dream, is really quite good. In order to explain why I think this, I’m going to have to talk about Mad Men for a bit. Mad Men is an odd beast. At its worst it is basically…
-Reviewed by Caroline M. Davies- Annah Browning’s The Marriage is a chapbook of twenty poems dealing, as one might expect from the title, with the institution of marriage and its aftermath. Many of these poems are filled with foreboding. The opening poem, ‘Dear One afternoon in January’ ends with the lines – we’ll walk…
-Reviewed by Harry Giles- The Fruit Journal presents so completely as an academic journal – mid-seventies cover design and typography, diagrammatic images, the wry full title Understanding Foetal States In Uteri: A Fruit Journal of Prenatal Development – as to feel like a trick, a joke, a smuggling of poetry under plain covers. As an…
-Reviewed by David Clarke- John Freeman has been publishing poetry books with small presses since the mid-1970s, and reviews in magazines since a decade before that. On the basis of this book, a collection of his prose poems, he is not nearly as well-known as he should be, and it is no small irony that,…
-Reviewed by Angelina Ayers- The Emma Press, founded in 2012, is “dedicated to producing books which are sweet, funny and beautiful”. The Poetic Primer, inspired by Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, follows on the heels of their Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse. The Primer has 15 contributors, 21 poems, and is divided into two…
-Reviewed by Emma Lee- Jim Maguire’s passion for music is conveyed throughout Music Field without it becoming tired. Indeed, the pamphlet feels organic and explores the theme in a multiplicity of ways, including performance, writing, audience, long-suffering spouses and a poem written from the viewpoint of a musician’s chair (now in a museum). Readers are…
-Reviewed by Hayden Westfield-Bell- Worldly. That adjective seems to fit Lighthouse #3 (Autumn 2013) best; the short stories, essays and poems contained within are fit-to-burst with cultural content from foreign lands. We begin close to home – the USA/UK – then travel to warmer climates – Spain, Guayaquil – and emerge in The Hague, then…
-With Jonathan Aldridge- Emma Wright founded the Emma Press, an independent small publisher, in 2012. The press’ titles include The Flower and the Plough, the debut pamphlet from Rachel Piercey, The Emma Press Anthology Of Mildly Erotic Verse and The Emmores, a pamphlet by Richard O’Brien. The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood is publishing on…
-Reviewed by Paul McMenemy- David Clarke’s Flarestack Poets Pamphlet Competition winning collection, Gaud begins with a demonstration of all that is best in his poetry: ‘Sword-Swallowing for Beginners’. Start by flicking the fleshy switch at the back of your throat. When you’ve thrown up a dozen times, you’ll find the impulse subsides – you…
-Reviewed by Andie Berryman- Yes, I thought of the 1988 cult film when I saw the title of this new collection of Young Adult fiction from the Pankhearst collective, it’s nothing like Heathers, so why call it Heathers? For Producer Evangeline Jennings its more like re-claiming Heathers, Heathers could have been a culturally precise movie,…
-Reviewed by Rosie Breese- Rainn, the jacket blurb says, is ‘an auto-fiction collaboration’ between anarchist poet/publisher Freke Räihä and the three co-authors Amy Silbergeld, Matthew Landis and Jonas Wessel. I’m not sure what a collaboratively-written novel should look like; indeed, this is probably the first piece of collaborative auto-fiction I’ve ever come across. I was expecting…
-Reviewed by James Webster- Quiltbag – an acronym standing for Queer and Questioning, Unidentified, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer OR – an unbelievably charming, friendly and welcoming evening of crafts and cabaret with a queer-friendly focus. A cuddly kind of cabaret … Upon entering Quiltbag on a very brrrr-worthy, cold December night, I was…
-By Richard T. Watson- [Ed: This post, its subject, the distributing/promoting/reading of this post and of its subject, are probably illegal in Russia – a democratic major world power with 142.5 million people, holding a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and the host in February 2014 of probably the world’s third largest sports…
-Reviewed by Billy Mills- Paige Taggart is a native of California and resident of Brooklyn. In addition to her poetry, she designs and makes jewellery which, if her website is anything to go by, is decorative, colourful and attractive. Last Difficult Gardens is a chapbook comprising a sequence of fourteen poems in what might, I…
-Reviewed by David Clarke- The coincidence which was the starting-point for Angela Topping’s collaboration with textile artist Maria Walker, the full results of which will be shown at this year’s Stanza festival in St Andrews, could hardly have been more compelling. In 2009, Topping and Walker met at an arts event in Cheshire and decided…
