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The archive is a separate site formed from all the posts from that original Ink Sweat & Tears website, it consists of everything we have published up to the end of 2019.
Recent posts
Chris Hardy, in praise of ‘A Triptych of Birds and A Few Loose Feathers’ by Pratibha Castle
At the start of this powerful first collection we encounter careful, affectionate observations of animals, flowers and birds: cuckoo, red kite, heron, wren, sparrow, ‘incense of wild thyme, garlic, blooming beneath my feet’, (SOUTH DOWNS) around an...
Lisa Perkins
Oktoberfest Gretel nurses a knot at a table for two in a dive bar in Berlin. Bloated shadows crawl above the industry of night. He’s late. Nerves ripple crumbs, popcorn for the crows. Habit makes a ghostly work of worry, she orders something...
Corinna Keefe
Good God Corner, Harlech It’s all Good God Corners around here all hairpin bends and sharp breaths in perpendiculars and parallels that pull you out to sea a riptide of light reaching down from the hills toppling the little train into the water. I...
Runaways London
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSG5IkAWgFs&t=8s Royal Charters in 1600 and 1660 established the East India Company and the Royal African Company and between them these two bodies probably wrought more misery and devastation in Asia and Africa than...
Jubilee Suite: Sanah Ahsan
fresher At the freshers week party bodies pack sweaty into free-floating balloons. A chorus of down it from thirst you almost know. You unwillingly gulp the cold. Mum worked Saturdays to afford you here. Puke crawls up the back of your throat. Swallow...
Jubilee Suite: Poem from Momtaza Mehra and Image from Tasia Graham (from Runaways London)
Forgotten journey of the enslaved Tasia Graham © Reclamations by Momtaza Mehri No longer child No longer Monday’s firstborn No longer carrying the day’s exultations No longer embraced by broad-leaved belt of forest No longer at the lush edge of the edge...
Jubilee Suite: Gboyega Odubanjo
Obit. (After César Vallejo) i will die in london in the neighbourhood i grew up in outside the town hall on the high street. i will have been stabbed and my killer will look just like me so no-one will look for him. my body will remain dead in daylight...
Jubilee Suite: Jayda David
The Queen is a Bloodclart the queen is a Bloodclart dissect the monarchy, pull it apart, reveal the truth that they wish they could conceal; raping, pillaging, stealing, imperialism, colonialism, racism. they protect those with the same face as...
Jubilee Suite: The Repeat Beat Poet
Tommy Builds A Cocktail Tommy spied a sun-dried palm tree in an untouched garden with crusty dark skin and cracks riddling all along its side, weeping out of its shell he aimed for a branch and down a coconut fell it didn’t implode on...
Critique, Dissent, and Resistance: A Suite of Poems for the Jubilee
At its height, the British empire was the largest in history, and for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913 the British Empire controlled 412 million people, 23% of the world's population at the time, and by 1920, it covered 35 million km2...
Jubilee Suite: Hansika Jethani
Rallying Cry they ask me where i am from / and i do not know how to answer / because how do i tell them the story of my truths / when the all the sentences attached to them / have been conveniently buried / before they could reach the mouths of...
Thea Smiley
The Carousel See the painted horses galloping in circles- I am one of them, struck through the belly with a swizzle stick, a gold pole as golden ...
Benedicte Kusendila
ESTUARY It is only the sun spitting rays Just the indefinite flight of a balloon that let go of its child It is only squinting, just a nod Just the chatter of a flock on the wire, hurried South It is only the last call Just glass breaking the...
Sonia Burns
Stash Your spaces silently narrow - slowly clogging arteries, plaque formed out of photographs, boxes stacked and shelves furred up, records, CDs, DVDs. Kitchen stuffed with cookery books, spiralisers, coffee machines and avocado-half-holders;...
Sarah Crowe
mary anning, fossil hunter she wore her dead sister’s name as a cloak to ward off the sea’s icy wrath trawled stony beaches sought curiosities with cut calloused hands chiselled and hammered jurassic rocks to display ammon’s horns, snakestones,...
Topher Allen
The Gods Are Addicts It’s better to be cremated, the only way to heaven is as smoke. Burials are the devil’s idea to harvest bones, to set them ablaze and raise hell. Volcanic eruptions are his failed attempts to ascend. Kerosene-lamps know this,...
Andrea Holland
How Young Bodies Work Grace…in that light was a promise of balance – Joy Harjo O timeline drop us here the moment you step from the subway on 23rd the boy spinning on his back / popping air O body sharpening skin into spin solo show staged on asphalt...
Clare M Coombe
In love with You played Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga on vinyl, because it was on trend again, and not just for our dads, and we thought it was cool to know all the words to Judas, because we’d studied theology and we had PhDs. And we danced...
Mandy Macdonald
emerald earrings misfortune from nowhere stooped like a peregrine folded, weaponized slicing away before from after as clean as cutting butter or severing heads half the house is collapsed open to the weather defenceless, astounded the other half...
Susan Castillo Street reviews ‘Swimming to Albania’ by Sue Hubbard
On reading Sue Hubbard’s collection Swimming to Albania, the concept that comes to mind is saudade. A. F. G. Bell writes in his study In Portugal, published in 1912:‘The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that...