London Word Festival Returns
Posted February 19, 2010 by Tom
Dark docklands hymnals? Jokes about the Large Hadron Collider? Performance poetry via Powerpoint slides? Screenprinting nuns?
Yes, it’s the return of London’s premier alternative lit-and-arts jamboree. The 2010 installment of London Word Festival starts on 7th March, runs for just under a month. Tickets, news, video and more.
Gross Out
Posted January 18, 2010 by Tom
Newsflash | Newsflash | Newflash
Philip Gross has won this year’s TS Eliot Prize, British poetry’s big one, for his sixth collection The Water Table. Gross, whom I had the pleasure of seeing read last night alongside the nine other shortlisted poets, is also known as an author of children’s books and has even contributed to the Point Horror series for ‘young adults’. Do you remember them?
To read what Hand + Star thinks about Gross, check out CJ Underwood’s review (he gave it three stars).
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J.S. Watts reviews Wake by Cliff Forshaw
In Wake, co-winner of Flarestack Poets’ Pamphlet competition 2009, we are taken on a series of geographical and metaphysical journeys, echoing with Cliff Forshaw’s early itinerant lifestyle, around both the globe and the poet’s psyche. Forshaw is now teaching at Hull University and the salt air of Hull docks, not to mention the role the city [...]
Tom Chivers reviews The English Sweats by James Brookes
The poems of James Brookes share some of the characteristics of that creepy Victoriana that is all the rage with designers and artists nowadays. Stuffed rodents. Phrenology. Wax jackets. That sort of thing. Steampunk without the punk.
They are also exquisitely crafted, with an ear for the rough and tumble of the English tongue.
Call a harsh ‘chack’; song [...]
More reviews
Theodoros Chiotis reviews Continental Shelf by Fred D'Aguiar
Ian Brinton reviews After the Goldrush by Peter Carpenter
Sophie Mayer reviews Lee Valley Poems by Yang Lian
Will Carr reviews High Performance by Luke Wright
Sophie Mayer reviews Leaving Fingerprints by Imtiaz Dharker
Ian Brinton reviews Conversation with Murasaki by Tom Lowenstein
Get Parochial!
Luke Wright
Get Parochial!
Sling those Slim Jim drain pipes in the bin!
You’re not an indie filmmaker or DJ;
turns out you’re just a navel-gazing tit.
When you find your iPod case collection’s
into double figures – you must leave.
More new writing
When all my disappointments came at once by Todd Swift
The Subprime Lending Crisis Explained as Twelve Points of Punctuation by Sarah Hesketh
You Are The Weather by Sophie Mayer
Vanishment by Adam Horovitz
The Before and After by Natasha Soobramanien
Pink Flamingo Soup by Brian Kelly
Jeremy in Shoreditch
Chris McCabe
In Shoreditch kebabs start to spin at ten in the morning. Last night’s kebabs, left whole on the cooking skewer like carcasses of guard dogs in the windows, dozing beside the amber grilles. The general rule is one chicken kebab, like a punchbag made of shoe tongues, and one…whatever the other one is.
Jeremy Reed has been trying to get me along to see his warehouse of books for weeks. I’ve finally succumbed to another book-fix, the foxed underworld of signed poetry first editions. A collector dies (usually a poet) and a house is left full of stapled and spineless pamphlets, functionless dust-traps. At least to the uninitiated. A small ripple casts across a pond of contacts, a bid is made, the books are shifted in crates to a warehouse. Then the email tip-off arrives, asking you in for a cut.
More features
Visible Poets, Invisible Translation by Sophie Mayer
Disobedience: On Not Reading Alice Notley by Sophie Mayer
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