review Articles
Identity Poetics: A Century of Englishness
Christopher Madden reads the latest anthology edited by John Greening and Kevin Gardner, and the new poetry collection by Aaron Kent. Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922-2022, Ed. John Greening & Kevin Gardner Every anthology poses two fundamental questions: ‘Why this?’, and ‘Why now?’ For John Greening and Kevin Gardner, the editors of Contraflow: Lines of…
Christopher Madden
Review – Heritage Aesthetics by Anthony Anaxagorou
Our New Damage What are the contours of heritage when it ruptures through colonialism and diaspora? This dense, multifaceted question is the organising principle of Anthony Anaxagorou’s new collection of poetry, Heritage Aesthetics – primarily concerned with the underexamined intersections of British-Cypriot identity, colonial history, and masculinity. Geography and cartography yield structural anxieties: littoral Cypriot…
Tom Branfoot
Review – From From by Monica Youn
Atom by Atom… From From, Monica Youn’s fourth book of poems, is a striking departure from her first three books. Instead of addressing race obliquely and occasionally, From From confronts it full-on, from beginning to end. Interviewed in Bomb magazine, Youn explained, ‘I always felt I had permission to talk about race, but I wanted…
Jee Long Koh
Review – Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort
Music for the Dead and Resurrected, which won the International Griffin Prize for Poetry in 2021, is Mort’s third collection. The poems rove and hover over an icy, war-ravaged, politically-damaged Minsk (or ‘the hero-city of Minsk’ as the speaker in ‘Self-Portrait with the Palace of the Republic’ was forced to refer to it as in…
Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola
Review – Morning Lit: Portals After Alia by Omar Sabbagh
Omar Sabbagh’s Morning Lit: Portals After Alia offers us an extended meditation on early fatherhood, exploring what the poet describes as the ‘transformative distance’ travelled across the ‘entries’ of a relationship with his newborn daughter. Often lyrical, the poems here are also often very down-to-earth, giving us the reality of the early months of fatherhood…
Jonathan Edwards
Review – Wilder by Jemma Borg
Searching for Wild Connections ‘Poems are records of true risks […] taken by the soul of the speaker,’ writes Jorie Graham[1], but what if a poem speaks with a voice that is not always human, plant or animal, but something broader and wider in scope. How do we recognise that soul? What are the connections…
SK Grout
Review – As She Appears by Shelley Wong, Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris
Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, is a deeply self-aware, courageous, and lyrical collection that weaves together history, humour, and ecological metaphor to explore Wong’s experiences as a queer fourth-generation Chinese American. The tone is conversational but not plain, and the collection’s strength lies not in any attempt on Wong’s part to deploy complex forms…
Maggie Wang
Review – Manorism by Yomi Ṣode and Refractive Africa by Will Alexander
Dazzling Refractions of Light and Dark Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon writes in his biography of Caravaggio: ‘He had always been an outsider, a troublemaker, a difficult and dangerous man. Yet his art was so compelling, so original, so unforgettable, that people were simply transfixed by it… The fact that he was obliged to invent himself…
Rishi Dastidar
Review: ‘How To Wash A Heart’ by Bhanu Kapil
In How To Wash A Heart, her first UK-published collection, Bhanu Kapil offers a timely and intimate exploration of hospitality, expressed through the story of a fictional relationship between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. Wrapped up in this story are other stories: of the artist trying to create, the body’s inescapably visceral condition,…
Devina S