Another month, another group of six fine poets – from an October selection where any of our offerings was a possible for the shortlist.
So who will you choose?
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- Rushika Wick, ‘quiet’: line breaks create a choppy rhythm mirroring that of lights at a club, a hot and terpsichorean poem
- Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad, ‘A zuihitsu of strings’: word & image that uses fragmentation to capture the nature of traumatic memory,
- David A. Lee, ‘Hopscotch After Rain’ which gives the play of children a mystical feel without taking away from its essential nature.
- Sarah James/Leavesley, ‘The art of cutting and stitching’, a visceral exploration of the violence perpetuated on women by society, masked as protection
- Pratibha Castle, ‘Conscience’: its skittish rhythm evokes the restlessness of wrestling with one’s conscience.
- Tadhg Carey, ‘Pivotal’ a wonderful sense of anticipation that deftly illustrates the momentousness of sport while going beyond its confines.
All six of the shortlist have been chosen by Helen, Kate or Sairah or received the most attention on social media. They can be found below. (Please scroll down.)
Please VOTE HERE. Voting closes at 6pm on Wednesday 19 November.
Our ‘prize’ is £25 towards the charity of your choice or an emailed National Book Token giftcard*.
*Book tokens can only be used within the UK. Sadly, we are unable to find suitable cost-effective alternatives outside the UK.
THE IS&T OCTOBER 2025 SHORTLIST
quiet
slid in bass-drop dams up
pierced ears, furred
with youth, his vest drinks sweat,
high-tops, Moog-loop
domed cap punctured
with embroidery, brailled
ethnographic record, reverb
haze of brisk lavender, wire mesh
trash of the park, sun-burnt song,
something about the power
of gaze, arc of hand to the ring’s
negative space – astrological
movement in the ecology of court,
echo, orb, limbs
stirring over him inter
a pattern. pattern up – this belonging
this world, the bounce
the squeak, hot bodies on bail
from sentences of looming
adulthood, the classroom
the death of a father
Rushika Wick is a writer, editor and paediatrician. Her first collection Afterlife As Trash (Verve 2021) was highly commended in the Forwards. She is interested in the poetics of witness, infections and cyborg identities and co-edited the Disease Anthology published by Carnaval Press in 2022. Rushika currently holds a scholarship at the Poetry School x Newcastle University MA in writing poetry.
*
A zuihitsu of strings
for Ying
A lacquer table, gloss under fingertips. A raised stage with dark linen. A young woman smiles with her hand-held harp, its nine strings glistening. The room swells with the cadence of her pearly notes. Beneath the pendant lights—a vision of serenity.
*
The memory of my fingers at three—curious caterpillars, pressing the keys of a toy piano. My hawk-eyed parents note there is something there. The search for a teacher leads to a derelict with ochre walls, a staircase winding into an attic. Ramshackle shelves stacked with music, a hoary piano bundled in a corner, more carcass than instrument, still holding woody notes. A child set on the path.
*
Some things are forbidden: flat hands, locked wrists, crossed feet. Each lesson begins by flexing my soft bones, the conscious unknotting of my spine, my hands holding the fullness of an imaginary grapefruit, then letting the orb drop, but remembering its perfect curvature as my fingertips hit the ivory.
*
Outside the music room, birds peck at the shadows of coolibah trees. Their trunks peel—grand staffs shedding the curls of their braces. A gale strips all stray notes and sows them upon the dunes.
*
I tremble as my teacher looms—a backlit beast in the sandstone fortress. Her rattan cane, sleek and sharp, writes warnings on the wall. I watch it twitch—an uneasy metronome. My gaze must never waver from the score. A wayward glance at my fingers and a swoop of the cane leaves a searing kiss. The lub-dub of my pounding heart. High-treble strings shine across my metacarpal bones in lines of wet crimson. In time, they soften to mauve, and resemble a harp.
*
But the teacher is God. I learn to cover her hostility with irises and calendula, her features less macabre when obscured by flowers. Without a face, she is just a bouquet of desert blossoms. I watch from the bench as her protege plays the Ocean Étude. I marvel at the flawless articulation as my teacher transforms into a swathe of sunlit sea, basking in her student’s artistry. I aspire to be the perfect student—the one who elicits kind waves. I rub my wounds, and wait patiently by the shore.
*
Water bleeds onto city asphalt. The tremolo of the Enmore night—metal and slanted rain. Poems strung on tuning pins. The harp flowers in arpeggios.
*
This is who I always wanted to be—a musician with my edge off. The young woman on stage runs her fingers on the strings. The softness of her touch brings forth silver rivers. My meditation is interrupted by the ghost of my teacher’s cane. But I have harped on its cruelty too long. I shred it to splinters and bury its memory.
*
A brewery transformed—white linen and chandelier light. The humble beerhouse morphs into a ballroom of gold—a measure of healing, in the aura of the muse who plays the harp tonight.
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an award-winning Indian-Australian artist, poet, and improv pianist. She lives and works on traditional Gammergal land. Find her @oormilaprahld and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings
*
Hopscotch After Rain
Chalk squares bloom on cracked pavement,
washed, then reborn by small hands.
Footsteps drum in bright dust:
one hop, two hops, balance kept
inside a geometry of chance.
Stones leap, arcs of small planets
carved in ordinary air.
We whisper counts under breath,
touch down, turn, and lift again,
gravity loosening like a knot.
For an instant, we hover
between chalk and sky,
believing the ground is optional.
David A. Lee is a physician and emerging poet born on a Sioux Indian reservation whose work explores memory, play, and the human spirit. His poems will be appearing in literary journals, and he draws on heritage and clinical insight to illuminate ordinary moments.
*
The art of cutting and stitching
My mother’s knife made the first cuts –
she removed my fertile light bulbs,
then stuffed my womb with shredded tissues.
Not cruelty, you understand, but failed
protection. Men have still hacked
and moulded. A chop, then extra plum pudding
for my breasts’ unevenly swung pendulum.
Another snip and twist for my goblin nose, dye
for my mouse-brown hair, sky-coloured glass
instead of the wince-green eyes I was born with.
Several broke my narrow hips to loosen
the bone hinge keeping my body closed to them.
Only in their minds, you understand, but the line
between thought and reality is far thinner
for some. None of this spoken aloud.
When she looked at the baby in her arms,
my mother saw woman, and the pain
of my whole life quaked through her.
She’d have stitched me a tail if she could,
the grace of a fish to leave her eggs
behind a stone and swim free.
That glint of silver, you understand, is not
the flash of her blade, but sunlight
glancing off those scales she tried to give me.
Sarah James/Leavesley is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Her latest collections are Darling Blue (Indigo Dreams), an ekphrastic book-length poetry narrative which won the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024, and Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic (Verve Poetry Press). Website: http://www.sarah-james.co.uk.
*
Conscience
as taught her by the nuns was a bridle
on a young girl’s tongue pony frolic legs
a choke-hold on convolvulus excess
seductive as leaves skittering over moon
scatter grass dandelion pappus weighted
with girlish longings a burr hooked
onto the undercarriage of a rook in flight
that b r e a k i n g f r e e nuzzles into earth’s
amorous embrace wooed by rhapsodies
of amoral worms nurtured by clouds lavish
as a toddler’s sulk blasé gaze of wolf or super moon
till a blackbird at spring’s edge pipes their tarantella
stirs the first tousle-headed dente-de-lion
sun-gold tongues ravishing a winter-drowsy bee
Pratibha Castle –A finalist in Fool for Poetry Chapbook and McLellan Poetry Awards 2025, shortlisted in Fish, Live Canon and Bridport Prize, placed in Sonnet or Not and Plaza Competitions, widely published in magazines such as Under the Radar, Ink Sweat & Tears and Aftershock, was awarded third prize in Sonnet or Not. Her second pamphlet Miniskirts in The Waste Land was a PBS winter selection 2023.
*
Pivotal
When our plaything ricochets
falling
who knows where
everything hinging
on the line
there is a precise moment
when nothing is certain
a glorious terrifying uncontrollable
wait
the receptacle of our hopes
poised mid-
air with infinite trajectories
across the open field of possibility
time is slowed to an inhalation
and as I write this I am helpless
as an onlooker watching
from the sidelines
open-
mouthed
on the threshold of expression
not knowing where this will all end
nor what will follow the breaking
of the line
Tadhg Carey is a writer from Ireland. He is a Shared Island Freedom to Write Project awardee, was selected for the Cúirt International Festival New Writing Showcase, and was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook competition.