by Kate Birch | Aug 16, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
There is an international feel to our July shortlist with poets from or having worked and lived all over the world. Fruit, particularly the apple, reoccurs and in several of the poems there is a faint hint of chlorine. Choose from: Susana Arrieta, ‘Picnic’: no picnic...
by Kate Birch | Jul 29, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Because it is a beautiful evocation of the land/Palestine’s grief ‘Homeland’ by Rachael Clyne powerfully pinpoints the current horrors of the world, particularly the genocide in Gaza, but also speaks to the general sorrow of displacement and loss of...
by Kate Birch | Jul 1, 2025 | News
Fundamentals 1. There is only one ball but countless ways to help your team. 2. Intentions matter: win or lose each game requires your fullest effort 3. The jump-shot is a fickle partner restless — it will stray from time to time; don’t fall in love with it....
by Kate Birch | Jun 13, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Vivid, precisely imagined, powerful ‘Wallpaper’ calls out to a troubled world, its potent imagery and raw language both striking and disturbing; and for this reason Joseph Blythe’s poem is the Pick of the Month for May 2025. Joseph Blythe’s prose and poetry has...
by Kate Birch | May 16, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Queer positivity It was so moving! I feel a bit numb upon finishing it. Sometimes a poem just captures a moment. Elena Chamberlain’s was originally published just over a week before the Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological...
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...
