Pullen’s queer gothic horror story weaves carefully between the lines of history Nicholas Pullen | The Black Hunger | Orbit: £9.99Reviewed by Thomas D. Lee Earlier this year I was privileged enough to be sent a digital proof of Nicholas Pullen’s phenomenal debut The Black Hunger, a dark delight of a book in which the […]
Much Ado About Nothing | Shakespeare’s Globe | Reviewed by Paul Knowles and Sam Cassells
Comic barbs fly between Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Globe’s contemporary version of Much Ado About Nothing, which handles the fine line between comedy and tragedy with aplomb. Much Ado About Nothing | Shakespeare’s Globe | Reviewed by Paul Knowles and Sam Cassells On a blazing day, in mid-August, we found ourselves in the hallowed […]
Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter, Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles and Sam Cassells
Doomed Love, Broken Promises, and the Fatalistic Irish in Barry’s Gritty Western. Kevin Barry | The Heart in Winter | Canongate: £16.99Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles and Sam Cassells From the moment a drunken opium-riddled Tom Rourke stumbles out of a bar in Butte, Montana in 1891 — In The Heart in Winter’s opening pages […]
Joe Devlin: A collection of modified bookmarks, The Portico Library, reviewed by Joseph Hunter
The novel is always dying, never dead. Prophets of doom are readily available. Will Self would have you believe that the ‘analogue brain’ is going extinct. People just don’t read anymore, we hear. Even students who are paying for a reading-and writing-based education don’t read the texts they’re set to read. (Perhaps that last bit […]
Kathryn Tann, Seaglass, reviewed by Joseph Hunter
Kathryn Tann | Seaglass | Calon: £16.99Reviewed by Joseph Hunter Seaglass, the debut essay collection by Kathryn Tan, is best described as part memoir, part nature writing – and there is a great deal of beauty in Tann’s explorations of the crossover between these two things. The collection clearly owes something to the ongoing rise or […]
Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, reviewed by Usma Malik
Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, Tin House: $16.95 Reviewed by Usma Malik Uche Okonkwo, an award-winning short story writer, is a former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar and recipient of: a Steinbeck Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship (Phillips Exeter Academy), and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Set in contemporary Nigeria, Okonkwo’s debut short story collection A […]
Jemma Borg | Wilder | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Jemma Borg | Wilder | Pavillion Poetry: £9.99 In Wilder, Jemma Borg tackles existential pressures with a series of subtle and flexible eco-poetic experiments that display a range of impressive results. The opening poem is devoted to the sharp, spiny ‘Marsh thistle’. In asking ‘What part of a human soul is this thistle?’, the collection […]
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | reviewed by Jack McKenna
Paul Henry | As If To Sing | Seren Books: £9.99 Sorrowful songs flow from Paul Henry’s newest collection, As If To Sing. These are careful, melodious poems that learn to listen for the watery current that carries love and loss together in our everyday lives. The opening sonnet, ‘Tributary’, follows the speaker returning to where […]
David Constantine | Rivers of the Unspoilt World | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
David Constantine | Rivers of The Unspoilt World | Comma Press: £8.99 Salford author David Constantine, the award winning poet (Queen’s Medal for Poetry 2020), short story writer, translator, and editor, returns with his haunting new collection, ‘Rivers of the Unspoilt World. Constantine’s sixth collection of short stories has a laser sharp focus on the importance […]
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles
Reshma Ruia | Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness | Dahlia Publishing: £10.00 Reshma Ruia’s, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness is a quiet, contemplative short story collection that asks what happens to immigrants’ dreams in the age of globalisation. What is striking about Ruia’s debut short story collection is that all her characters are in a […]
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You | reviewed by Edward Heathman
Sally Rooney | Beautiful World, Where Are You? | Faber & Faber: £16.99 Sally Rooney, Ireland’s most recent literary sensation, certainly knows how to draw readers in with her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Centring around the friendships between the two main characters and their partners, it offers a familiar portrait of millennials as they […]
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | reviewed by Ian Pople
Kimiko Hahn | Foreign Bodies | W.W.Norton: $26.95. There is a strong, driving sense of personal narrative in the poems in Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies. It feels clear that the ‘I’ in the poems is the writer, herself. This is a first person who is almost fiercely committed to the narratives that create the […]
Nicholas Royle | White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nicholas Royle, White Spines, Confessions of a Book Collector, Salt Publishing; £9.99 What I anticipated, on hearing about this book, was something similar to Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built, a kind of bildungsroman about the psychology of reading. I was wrong. This unusual volume is more of a literary travelogue for readers, writers, […]
Dorothy Molloy, The Poems of Dorothy Molloy reviewed by David Cooke
The Poems of Dorothy Molloy. Faber & Faber: £10.99. Born in 1942, Dorothy Molloy starting writing poetry relatively late in her life and it is a sad irony that, having been accepted by Faber and Faber, her first collection, Hare Soup, had just been delivered by the printers in the week that she died of […]
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems, reviewed by David Cooke
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin: Collected Poems. €20.00 (Pb) The Gallery Press. The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, […]
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans
Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (£9.99) In her second collection – what the poet refers to as the ‘sister’ to her first, called Slant Light – Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem: ‘Have you looked, Have you looked deeply – the feeling, the feeling is […]
Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis: Interviewed by Sarah Walters and reviewed by Alienor Bombarde
Nina Simone’s Gum, by Warren Ellis Interview by Sarah Walters Organised by David Coates, at Manchester’s Blackwells. Following the publication of his memoir Nina Simone’s Chewing Gumthe Australian musician and member of the rock groups Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Warren Ellis, visited Manchester’s Blackwells. There, he discussed his inspiration, and memories with Sarah […]
Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | reviewed by Ian Pople
Eduardo C. Corral | Guillotine | Graywolf Press: $16.00 There is a sharp, tangy sense about Eduardo C. Corral’s poems. Sometimes that tang is almost literal; these poems are never shy about talking about the senses at their most acute. But that tangy quality is part of the Corral’s style, too. The poems are often organised in […]
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | reviewed by Ian Pople
Jane Hirshfield | Ledger | Bloodaxe: £10.99 There is a quiet quality to much of Jane Hirshfield’s poetry which sits between the zen-like and the vatic. Hirshfield is not afraid to flirt with rhetoric, but manages to contextualise it with a neatly drawn reality. Ledger is Hirshfield’s sixth Bloodaxe volume in the UK and begins with a […]
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | reviewed by Ian Pople
Carolyn Forché | In the Lateness of the World | Bloodaxe Books: £10.99 The blurb to Carolyn Forché’s first full collection for seventeen years suggests that the poems are ‘meditative’. That’s one way to describe them but it might not be the best. The fact that many of these poems are narratives either in the first person […]
Amy Woolard | Neck of the Woods | reviewed by Ian Pople
Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, Alice James Books, $16.95 There’s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard’s debut collection, Neck of the Woods. A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: ‘All Get Out’, ‘Girl Gets Sick of […]
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | reviewed by Ian Pople
Sarah Feldman | The Half-Life of Oracles | Fitzhenry & Whiteside: C$15.00 The writer who takes on the oracular and the vatic is offering themselves up as a hostage to fortune. The subject matter may well take in the various versions of myth that are parts of certain types of education but not part of the education […]
London Gothic, by Nicholas Royle ( Confingo Press, £12.99), reviewed by Richard Clegg
London Gothic by Nicholas Royle ( Confingo Press, £12.99) As well as a novelist and film aficionado, Nicolas Royle is one of the foremost practitioners of the short story form. As editor and publisher of his own Nightjar publications, he has been a doughty champion of other writers, often well off the beaten track. The […]
Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | reviewed by Livi Michael
Nikolai Leskov | Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov | New York Review of Books: £14.99 The New York Review Books has published a selection of the stories of one of Russia’s lesser known writers, Nikolai Leskov. This beautifully presented volume contains six lengthy stories or novellas, and an excellent introduction by Donald […]
Carrie Etter, The Shooting Gallery (Verve), reviewed by Ken Evans
In The Shooting Gallery, Carrie Etter uses a favourite form, the prose poem, to interrogate and illuminate the fatal attraction in a country with more guns than people. However, her way in is not outrage or despair, but to look through an artist’s eye, in a sequence of twelve ekphrastic poems, featuring images suggested by […]
Robert Selby, The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, £10.00) | reviewed by Paul McLoughlin
A WORLD OF NOT MINDING Robert Selby’s poems are, as the blurb tells us, ‘love songs of England’: they set out to record and praise what’s good and will not allow themselves to get distracted. And what’s good is be found in its people. Even the war can come across as a matter of camaraderie […]
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Collected Poems (€20.00 (pb), The Gallery Press)
The publication of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Collected Poems, encompassing some half a century’s work, is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the full extent of her achievement and leaves one in little doubt that her poetry, by virtue of its emotional depth and imaginative élan, places her in the front rank of poets currently writing in […]
Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | reviewed by Ian Pople
Keith S. Wilson | Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love | Copper Canyon Press: $16.00 The back-cover blurb for this, Keith S. Wilson’s first collection, notes, ‘these are poems that speak in layers, bridging the interstitial spaces between the personal and societal longing.’ This sense of layers suggests that there is a horizontal ‘flow’ to Wilson’s poems. There is […]
Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | reviewed by Ian Pople
Christian Wiman | Survival is a Style | FSG: $24.00 In his essay ‘God’s Truth is Life’, Christian Wiman writes, ‘What might it mean to be drawn into meanings that, in some profound and necessary sense, shatter us? This is what it means to love. This is what it should mean to write one more poem. The […]
Arthur Sze | Sight Lines | reviewed by Ian Pople
Arthur Sze Sight Lines Copper Canyon Press $16.00 I had not encountered Arthur Sze’s poetry before and his approach is one of the most interesting and surprising that I’ve come across in a long time. It is almost as if Sze is a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet with images. The images roll out and around in Sze’s […]
Natural Selection | an essay on Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words: Selected Poems by Jim Johnstone
For those who are interested in Canadian poetry but have yet to investigate it seriously, Carmine Starnino’s Dirty Words offers a portal into the career of one of Canada’s finest craftsmen. Natural Selection Carmine Starnino, Dirty Words: Gaspereau Press, 2020 Volumes of selected poetry are double-edged propositions. On one hand, they’ve been known to consolidate reputations, […]
Ed Seaward | Fair | reviewed by Phoebe Walker
Ed Seaward | Fair | The Porcupine’s Quill Fair, the first published novel from Canadian author Ed Seaward, offers the reader a warped pilgrimage into the underbelly of Los Angeles, trailing in the footsteps of lost soul, Eyan, as he flies low under the uneasy influences of pint-pot street tyrant Paul, and a wandering, dishevelled […]
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay | Cynical Theories | reviewed by Ryan Whittaker
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, […]
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | reviewed by Ian Pople
Aria Aber | Hard Damage | University of Nebraska Press: $17.95 Not so long ago, I reviewed Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art on this page. The title of Aria Aber’s first volume, Hard Damage, points in a similar rhetorical direction. The title is a gesture, a performative, which throws down a gauntlet to the reader. It is […]
Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda | reviewed by Ian Pople
Pablo Neruda | The Unknown Neruda edited and translated by Adam Feinstein | Arc Publications: £11.99. Described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who might be considered just a little parti pris, as ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language’, Pablo Neruda has had a multitude of translators. Such a great poet will always […]