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...
by Kate Birch | Aug 18, 2024 | News, Picks of the Month
The poem speaks truth ‘When young boys go missing was a poem that so many voters, many of whom are based in Nigeria, found relatable and relevant, found it showed a ‘truth’ that many of us in the global north are just barely conscious of, and it is for these reasons...
by Kate Birch | Jul 21, 2024 | News, Picks of the Month
Beautiful interweaving of nature and human concerns The word ‘beautiful’ was repeated again and again in voters’ comments as this subtle, understated poem revealed the tragic death of a sister that lay at the heart of it, and it is for this reason and more that Robin...
by Kate Birch | Jul 1, 2024 | News
Offals The flavours of home are off-putting. Offals, glands, chitterlings; this last one, we call chinchulínes, my favourite. I always liked the name, the word’s aftertaste greasy like a swallow flying to better places leaving the ovenbird behind to build its...
