by Kate Birch | Aug 21, 2026 | Reviews
The poems in Jennie E. Owen’s The Horses Still Run (Dragon Fly Eleven, 2024) were imbued with an ambient fear – a low, persistent hum beneath the surface, an unease with a world out of step, both ecologically and socially. Fear remains central in...
by Kate Birch | Aug 12, 2026 | Reviews
Maybe it is happiness / mistranslated. This book quietly rearranged what I thought poetry was for. What I initially mistook for simplicity in Sluman’s clear and rhythmic verse I later realised was an embodiment of endurance. Pain Songs (Nine Arches Press) is a...
by Kate Birch | Jul 6, 2026 | Reviews
A poem by Graeme Ryan Artwork by Georgina King This is such a generous book – the very first things the reader notices are its large square size, and its glowing colours. There is a palpable sense of successful collaboration between poet and artist going on here. The...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Jun 17, 2026 | Reviews, Uncategorized
When Karen McCarthy Woolf begins Unsafe with an epigraph from Romantic poet John Clare, the son of a farmer who witnessed the rights to the countryside transfer from common people to private landowners, we are promised a grapple with the...
by Kate Birch | Jun 5, 2026 | Reviews
The Beat The Pulse The Wave appropriately has a pulsing energy to it, like waves crashing on a shore. Jeremy Dixon writes about life, past, present with hints at a future; it feels that each poem pins down an everyday experience but offers a slantwise look at...
by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | May 15, 2026 | Reviews
Rachel Dacus writes ‘I would say that magical realism in poetry (and fiction) removes the argument of “likeness”. It plunges the reader straight into an altered world, offering only mystery as a doorway. It isn’t always an easily entered door, but...
