by Helen Ivory | Feb 1, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Flock In the charity shop I try on a coat flocked with fake shearling, shaved-soft almost: fibres fired onto plastic to fool the wrist. At home I snap it. A dust of fur lifts, hangs, then drifts onto the draining board, the bulb, the bruised...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 21, 2026 | Reviews
Julia Webb’s Grey Time, her fourth collection with Nine Arches Press, insists on the full weather of grief. It refuses consolation or tidy acceptance, tracing the recursive ways mourning inhabits a life — memory, dream, body, animal. From the opening pages,...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 21, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Window of tolerance we’re trying to construct a frame for this highly reactive impulsive emotion the nurse is looking into it meanwhile we must find something cold to hold lick it we’re trying to expand the tolerance – think of a moth...
by Helen Ivory | Jan 20, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Strange Brew Anne dances to the beat of my childish heart, sings to cobwebbed spiders. She is nanny number five, my own Mary Poppins. By the light of a wolf moon, my father turns mad. Anne whispers to a girl in the wind, and a friend blows into my life....
by Helen Ivory | Jan 19, 2026 | Featured, Poetry
Revenge Squirrels dream of a cougar, a cougar given permission to crouch like an assassin awaiting its prey, its target; a cougar concealed in the squirrel tree. Squirrels scowl, chitter at the woman who once fed them corn and bread until she met...
