by Helen Ivory | Aug 14, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Miles of Memory The passenger train along the Connecticut shoreline moves as if in a river of wooden ties and steel rails. It travels through the old industrial towns like Bridgeport, long ago a manufacturer of brass, and places settled in New...
by Helen Ivory | Aug 13, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
High Hopes There are blackbirds singing beautifully at dawn, Mozart and Shakespeare existed and that’s fine, but each morning, I pray a new miracle will find its way into existence; elephant birds discovered deep in Madagascar, a cure for six...
by Kate Birch | Aug 12, 2026 | Reviews
Maybe it is happiness / mistranslated. This book quietly rearranged what I thought poetry was for. What I initially mistook for simplicity in Sluman’s clear and rhythmic verse I later realised was an embodiment of endurance. Pain Songs (Nine Arches Press) is a...
by Helen Ivory | Aug 12, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Houseplant daughter (Non-melancholic depression) Tonight, my houseplant child asks about sunlight, brushes my arm as she stutters on the word, photosynthesis, raises her eyes to the bulb as if to say, Will that do? I keep the curtains shut all day...
by Helen Ivory | Aug 11, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Liberty When she asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my mother laughed when I said ‘free’ She’s been dead for more than thirty years – not much freedom in her kitchen-sink life She settled for snatching time out, pausing with that dreamy...