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 | 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...
by Kate Birch | Jan 20, 2025 | News, Picks of the Month
Evocative portrait of a mining town. Killer last line It was one of the closest contests that we have had in some months, that in the end saw ‘A Town of Shadows’ emerge as the Pick of the Month for December 2024. Voters found it evocative, emotive, gritty...
