Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay | Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody | Pitchstone Publishing Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s new book, Cynical Theories, argues that much of modern scholarship has been ideologically compromised, endangering education and progress. With identity politics rising in global prominence, […]
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Editorial
The last thing many of us want to do right now is spend even more time looking at a screen, but our reading of new work for this issue of The Manchester Review reminded us again and again that poems, essays and fiction can transport you or suddenly refract your immediate environs into a charged […]
The Rainbow of Hope by Grace Greaves
Year 9 Altrincham Lizzie ran home from school, rushed into her flat and sat beside her mum in front of the TV. The Prime Minister was on the screen again, gesturing and addressing the country about the current situation. Just since last week comments, research and information about coronavirus had flooded the internet, spilling out […]
A Poem by Winston Ado-Kofie
Year 10 Trinity Bunched up on the shelf, keeping to myself. Store is ready to open, I hope I get chosen. The clock strikes the hour, people surge through with power. Rushing, leaping, grabbing, crushing, sweeping, nabbing. Fingers flex in anticipation, “Oh no! This is an assassination!” Strong, burly hands grab my house, along with […]
A Letter to the World by Sama Sameer
Year 9 TEMA Dear Earth, Today seems great, It’s the beginning of a new year, A fresh, clean slate. It’s a beginning of an era, And the end of an old one. The decade seems bright and new, But I am here from the future; I’m warning you. Some things will change, And horrifically, some […]
A Letter by Paige Hamilton
Year 7 Our Lady’s RC Dear Future Paige, How are you doing? How’s Mum and Dad? How are the brats? Of course, I mean our darling sisters. I’m doing okay, we’re still in lockdown (week twelve to be precise). It’s been tough, I’m not gonna lie. Somedays I’m not even getting out of bed until […]
Haven’t You Heard by Madeleine Storer
Year 11 Urmston He sat in his chair, hunchbacked, with his eyes fixed on the pages. To everyone else he was reading, but really, he was in a foreign world where he could taste the words on the tip of his tongue, hear them as they floated from the paper and chattered in his ears. […]
As the Doors Shut by Josh Cummings
Year 9 Rivington and Blackrod As the doors shut the statues in the town wake up. They walk around the empty pavement which miss the shop go-ers. Scattering across the town as they find the treasure they need. Outside the stadium the floodlights cry for their lights to switch on in the rain and fog […]
Mausoleum Man by James Tyrell Brown
Year 12 Xavierian Oh longest time yiv dreamt, me Mausoleum Man, Coffed in Mummy’s Charnel home stove ’round your stonewings’ span, You Monk brod in yar cell, ‘tween bunkous sellow stone sainwalls, All hued in Olden Woldic green, by lichen spattered greenfalls. You Embalm-ee bequested: just unnatural light for me; So acid lamps cast all […]
A Poem by Jacob Rashidi
Year 7 Co-op Academy Some of us must stay at home And not go out the door Some of us are working Like we’ve never worked before Some of us are falling out With siblings, Dads, and Mothers Some of us are reaching out And looking after others Some of us are keeping busy Doing […]
Liberty by Freya Stanley
I caught the scent of rain as it started to descend from the unpromising sky above. Each droplet of it was so miniscule I had to focus hard to see it falling to the ground. I stepped out of my house and felt the refreshing drops fall gently onto my skin. A light breeze delicately […]
Chaos Rides Our Lives by Fatimah Naser
Year 11 Whalley Range Chaos rides our lives. Schools, hotels, flights, airports, public gatherings all cancelled. I don’t know what to call this: strike 2 of the plague, a chapter from a dystopian novel, a scene from a grotesque horror movie- no words can truly exhibit the bewilderment that’s driving everyone’s minds towards madness. Everything […]
The Cause of the Pandemic: One Survivor by Farah Al-Rikabi
Year 8 Levenshulme Bang! Smash! “Professor Christopher, we need to tell the citizens the truth!” a woman with a lab coat and blond curls told the man beside . “How can we risk our entire company being sacked, Don’t you see! We will all be on our own with our families living in the streets! […]
A Day of Lockdown by Elliot Taylor
Year 8 Rivington and Blackrod I stretch my arms wide into the air and squint my eyes at the bright light shining into my bedroom through the curtains. ‘What a beautiful day’ I think to myself as I crawl out of bed. I stand up and walk over to my drawer pulling out shorts and […]
The Quiet in the Storm by Caitlin Bones
Year 9 Urmston The world has always been deafening. As the world spluttered to life, I’d awaken to the sound of my relentless alarm screaming, forcefully reminding me that I couldn’t live, wrapped up, in the arms of my peaceful dreams forever. With a flick of a switch, I’d silence the screaming and collapse back […]
Prison Life by Armaan Shahzad
Year 8 Burnage Day 1 My name is Armaan Shahzad and it is the 23rd of March 2020. The beginning of the year has been horrible: both Australia and Brazil caught fire, Kobe Bryant died and there were rumours of WW3. Just to make life easier, a lethal disease called “COVID-19” decided that now was […]
Alice Courtney
Year 12 Holy Cross RC Jennifer lives alone in a fourth floor flat near the centre of Manchester. She works from home and has the shopping delivered to her door each week. She’s recently started a diary documenting her lockdown experience. She hasn’t been out for 6 weeks. 8:00 am Morning wake up. Alarm going […]
Three Ethiopian Contemporary Women Poets
MEKDES JEMBERU City chicken All night the city chicken crows… so slick and smart that dawn or dusk…so what? brave bird…tradition pah! why should he care…? so this is what the city chicken says “cockadoodledoo!” he cries…impatient for the waking hour…to herald day “I’m living for myself…why give a fig for time? who gains…by suiting […]
2020, by Alice Barron-Eaves
2020 We must still wake and rise as we usually do put on our best faces our best graces and look out to a world we may not wish to we must hold in our dreams and make new ones hold onto our heads and forge a new smile even bolder than our last […]
Lockdown, by Beatrice Bacon
Lockdown It’s you and the view of the lamp posts, the pressed pavements and windows, clamped cars and drains that have stopped swallowing city sewage. It’s you in the toilet taking decadent minutes to stare at soap in the cupboard of the mirror—you think of what you’re yet to examine in your bathroom. In […]
Still Changing, by Jennifer Nuttall
Still Changing When the government told us to stay in our homes I grew bricks for feet. I watched each day unfold through spyhole eyes. Outside of myself was a world seemingly slowed to only a glass-portioned sun moving shadows across empty streets, and the sound of sirens just beyond my periphery. My mind was […]
Yoga with Kassandra, Nina Reljić
Yoga with Kassandra Some thoughts weigh enough to throw a body off balance e.g. fearing life touched by death, the spit of life which carries death, the grease of life, the talk of it. Kassandra’s face on my screen is hardly real, she has the stretch of gum while I am a mesh of nerves […]
Inside, by Adrienne Elliott-Wilkinson
Inside Thumping against the wall I think it’s a washing machine the sound of life going on outside of the body, the sound of a washing machine or maybe — you couldn’t call it lovemaking — Kate Bush in the background: washing machine jumping jacks? Life is going on above the shopfronts in the empty […]
Doll Heads, by Javier Fedrick
Doll Heads To amuse ourselves during quarantine, we set to work on all your old dolls, scalping each straw-haired head and packing it with dirt. We were left with a crowd of carved grins, middle-distance eyes and open minds, which, together, we filled with thyme, and basil, and childish cress— burying the seeds like fists […]
Homecoming, by Bethany Barker
homecoming we’re back here where we started, a pair of salty whelks born by the sea. the beach is vast and quiet. we talk about our escape, about how we dreamed of drifting and washing up like debris, someplace new. we wanted to hide from mismatched lights lining the water’s edge, where dark waves […]
Without Us, by Meena Sears
Without Us The shiny wooden floor is unusually clean for a Tuesday afternoon. No dropped broccoli nor puddles of custard decorate its surface. All the folding tables are lined up along the edges of the room Like soldiers in the trenches waiting for the command. Outside the only whistle to be heard is that […]
Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (tr.)¦The Idea of Perfection The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: a Bilingual Edition¦(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)¦ reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Paul Valéry, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody (translator)¦The Idea of Perfection The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry: a Bilingual Edition¦Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardback $54.50¦ reviewed by Edmund Prestwich Paul Valéry occupies an ambiguous position in modern literary culture. In later life – after he’d stopped writing poetry – he bestrode the French cultural scene like a […]
The Book of Tehran | edited by Fereshteh Ahmadi | reviewed by Kathryn Tann
The Book of Tehran | Comma Press: £9.00 Comma Press’ ‘Reading the City’ title series is rapidly filling up with quality collections, each more intriguing than the last. As they venture abroad to cities so often overlooked as creative hotbeds, these collections are not only an impressive logistical feat, nor merely an exercise in the […]
David Cooke | Staring at a Hoopoe | reviewed by Ken Evans
David Cooke | Staring at a Hoopoe | Dempsey & Windle Publishing: £10 It’s a confident poetry practitioner who opens a collection with a villanelle. The challenging form divides opinion in contemporary poetry, of course, with some saying the last word was had long ago by Thomas and Bishop (with perhaps, an almost grudging acceptance […]
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 In the last of our short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we skip merrily from Japan to China, then head on to France and Brazil, before finally ending up in New Orleans. We begin with a late night showing […]
Manchester International Film Festival – Days 3, 4, & 5 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 3, 4 & 5 In the second of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we hopscotch our way through Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Roy’s World, a documentary about the author Barry Gifford, a pair of directorial debuts separated by a couple of decades: […]
Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 | reviewed by Peter Wild
Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 In the first of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we cover days 1 and 2 of the festival… The festival opens with an opening night gala premiere for Traumfabrik, a romantic drama set in Berlin in 1961 (and France […]
Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | reviewed by David Cooke
Dario Jaramillo | Impossible Loves | Carcanet: £12.99 Impossible Loves by Dario Jaramillo is a bilingual selection from the work of Colombia’s greatest living poet translated into English by Stephen Gwyn, who has also written a helpful afterword. It’s the first time that Jaramillo’s poems have been made available to an English-speaking audience, an opportunity […]
Ken Evans reviews new work by Emma Simon, Alice Allen, Marie Naughton and Martin Zarrop
The much-missed Les Murray, writing about David Morley, highlighted his capacity to achieve a ‘refraction of the familiar.’ Emma Simon’s Smith/Doorstop pamphlet competition winner The Odds (2019) shares this ability to imbue the everyday with a shining radiance. Mundane details are given a twist of the Gothic as in a pub’s Hades-like cellar (‘The World’s […]