August hauls deep green dreaming
into the woods.
Even the bracken is so high and thick
I am up to my neck.
I feel its lure –
who doesn’t desire to trust
in what’s sprung, the emerald
caves, to lean in and be lost.
So writes Carola Luther in one of the new poems we publish in Issue 24 of The Manchester Review, a poem in which darker imaginings soon replace those fondly imagined “emerald caves”. The Manchester Review has been away for a while, a casualty of the caution and emergency planning which took over so many institutions over the past eighteen months, and we are very happy now to be back out in the world. We have missed the thrill of finding the best new work in our submissions inbox and bringing brilliant new poems, essays and stories from a range of writers to you, our readers. We are grateful as well to our colleagues in The Whitworth for allowing us to use images from Suzanne Lacy’s upcoming show, What kind of city? A manual for social change, whose ideas about “equitable transformations”, its own “deep green dreaming”, will strike a congenial note for our contributors and readers…
Please do share what you read widely!