Posts By: Jacqueline Saphra
Form Laboratory
Here are some exceptional poems from Jacqueline Saphra’s Form Laboratory. When I proposed this set of collaborative workshops to The Poetry School, I had no idea of the creativity it would unleash. During the darkening evenings of Autumn 2022, Thursdays became a poetic laboratory where an adventurous, generous, and inspired group of poets invented new…
Jacqueline Saphra
Teleporting into Poetry and the Law of Beautiful and Unintended Consequences
A rush of adrenaline and hope, combined with a feeling of fear and – OK – dread, have become very familiar to me as a part of my Zoom teaching life. What a strange idea: that one minute you’re sitting in your study alone, and the next you’re teleported into a virtual room with a…
Jacqueline Saphra
Review: ‘Louder than Hearts’ by Zeina Hashem Beck
In this emotionally charged, overtly political collection, the Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck writes her way through pain and passion, through history and politics, through bombings and journeys and injustice, through personal and political tales of family, parenthood, love, destruction, and loss. Hashem Beck writes with great dignity, verve and directness, never shying from difficult…
Jacqueline Saphra
Review: ‘Complicity’ by Tom Sastry
This promising pamphlet showcases a fresh and original voice exploring the self as proud outsider challenged by family, relationships and the world but refusing to compromise. The poet’s biography tells us ‘he thinks that not belonging is more interesting than belonging’ and this is certainly borne out in the poems. It’s a daring feat indeed…
Jacqueline Saphra
Review: ‘The Toll’ by Luke Wright
Luke Wright is at his forceful best in this state-of-the-nation adventure that is far darker than its jaunty rhythms and bell-like rhymes might suggest. The first poem of The Toll (Penned in the Margins), which serves as a kind of epigraph, carries the refrain ‘Oh England, heal my hackneyed heart’, and is one of the…
Jacqueline Saphra
Review: ‘The Watermark’ by Alice Anderson
I think of myself as pretty much unshockable, but there are, for me, some gasp-worthy moments in this unflinching collection from Alice Anderson. Set in the American South, The Watermark is an apparently confessional book and almost every element of Anderson’s world is refracted through a lens of sex and violence. This is the story…
Jacqueline Saphra
The Plot Inside The Poem
The playwright David Mamet famously said that what we want to know more than anything else is ‘what happens next’. My own obsession with narrative goes back to my writerly roots in theatre and later in film; I’m always looking for the story, even when it isn’t obvious. I’ve been making a study of the…
Jacqueline Saphra