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...
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...
