by Kate Birch | Dec 8, 2024 | News, Picks of the Month
The random uneasy moments resolve into the bluntness of grief. Honest and real. The vote this time was oh so close, perhaps the closest it has been for some years. But in the end it was the beautiful, moving simplicity of Stephen Keeler’s ‘Something about...
by Kate Birch | Nov 17, 2024 | News, Picks of the Month
Her work beautifully expresses an unimaginable challenge. This poem inspired voters and it moved them. But many also noted how beautiful it was, how powerful and visceral and how it was able to give a sense of not only the emotional upheaval the poet experiences but...
by Kate Birch | Nov 1, 2024 | News
Brown girls’ anthem A Golden Shovel after ‘Call Me by Your Name’ by André Aciman We die so many deaths before we turn twenty. We, the schoolyard Kardashians. We sew our stories, rip them out as the schoolbus pulls up at our door. We out cast our vile tongues so...
by Kate Birch | Oct 19, 2024 | News, Picks of the Month
Excellent title, and it all comes together in those final lines. The smell of the aftershave that couldn’t be washed off… ‘The Last Person on Earth’ took hold of the IS&T Pick of the Month voters for September. The poem was ‘punchy powerful and...
by Kate Birch | Sep 17, 2024 | News, Picks of the Month
flowing beautiful lines of emotion Again and again, the word beautiful came up in comments along with ‘sublime’ ‘lovely’ ‘stunning’ and ‘gorgeous’. But voters also loved the geographic connection, the use of map dimensions and the mirroring in a poem that could seem...
by Kate Birch | Sep 1, 2024 | Featured, News, Poetry
Badriya Abdullah is the fifth student to be awarded the University of East Anglia’s Birch Family Scholarship set up to support UK-based poetry MA students from the Black, Asian, Latinx and other global majority communities. This was established by IS&T...
