by Kate Birch | May 16, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
VOTING HAS NOW CLOSED; THE APRIL 2025 PICK OF THE MONTH WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. Faith runs as an undercurrent through most of not all of our shortlisted works for April 2025. Which writer will you put your faith into? Paul Bavister:‘Jigsaw’ which...
by Kate Birch | Apr 26, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
‘Succinct, raw, moving.’ Voters loved the language of the poem, its spirituality and the risks it took. They were impressed by the imagery, its rhythm, its line changes. But mainly they loved how it connected them to their mothers, to their parents, to...
by Kate Birch | Apr 6, 2025 | News
We are pleased to announce the following poems as our nominations for the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Written). Good Luck to all; our fingers are firmly crossed. Skins My mother had a handbag made from the skin of a female cobra her brother killed...
by Kate Birch | Mar 26, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Richly written human experience ‘Intuitive’, ‘creative’, ‘brilliant’, ‘relatable’, ‘beautiful’, ‘thought-provoking’ and with quite possibly the longest title that IS&T has ever published,...
by Kate Birch | Mar 1, 2025 | News
WHEN THE FLOWERS ARRIVE TOO LATE No flowers came till she caught him cheating that May, her apartment unfurled with wreaths of pleas yet, the soothing scent of petals couldn’t stir the dead butterflies in her gut often, we attempt to nectar morgued hearts with...
by Kate Birch | Feb 21, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Stripped of sentimentality, raw and beautiful. Authentic, deceptively simple and relatable This shortlist was all about lives – lives born, lives saved, lives lived, lives lost – and it is perhaps fitting that the poem that came first with voters was that which looked...
