Paths
This poem originated with a brutal relationship that tore at my soul. We have all been there; ravaged by a storm called love. My self-esteem was battered but I still clung on to the one who was drowning me.
Luke Palmer Surreal-Absurd Sampler
There’s a freedom and a weightlessness that comes with working alongside another version of yourself, as if you can forget all those concerns around ‘personal voice’ that are content-related, and just focus on the music of it.
Under-dreaming My Days Away
Nothing of the Month Club, is a book of mainly prose poems. More poetic and lyrical than Kharms, it is Vvedensky, the absurdist’s fellow OBERIU founding member, that springs to mind, in terms of style
An Interview with Cristina Peri Rossi
Cristina Peri Rossi is one of the most acclaimed voices in Hispanic letters. Born in 1941 in Montevideo to a family of Italian immigrants, she began publishing at a very young age, winning most of the significant literary prizes in Uruguay before going into exile to Spain in 1972 where she became a citizen in 1975.
Water Falling
A new story by Carl Oprey: The first year their summerhouse was built they counted a total of seventeen drips. Seventeen buckets and bowls filled slowly with forest rain tainted grey with new mortar. Water drops in the living room seeped through the patio above. Water drops in the kitchen next to the stove pooled across the slate floor. The summerhouse, called so because that would be the only time it would be used, was built as a favor to the architect whose business had been all but wiped out by the after-war recession. The man liked this architect’s work; factories and offices. His wife needed convincing.
Kim Hyesoon Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Imagination is the process of moving muscle in sync with bone, to a place of freedom, poetry’s vast outer side. It activates something to nothing. Perhaps I should say it’s a cloud mill? The place where cloud(poetry) knows but poet(me) doesn’t know.”
next S-s-startle
Creating photo-haiga is a central part of my daily art practice: I find it both invigorating and meditative, an often odd, but for me, happy combination. I have found that my photo-haiga can bring some readers closer to the poems. And please note that sometimes I find the photos to match poems sitting in waiting.
Madra
Madra, by Emma Hutton, won the Mairtin Crawford Award in 2019: My name is Madra. Where I come from it means dog. My mother said that when I was born I was red with fury and howling at the moon. For eighteen years, I have lived in a stone house that’s built on black land that sinks. My blood is close to the skin; you can see the branching of my veins. I like to run my hands over doorframes and pull out the splinters. I like to eat gravy with a spoon. I like to pinch the petals off asters and think about the motherless butcher’s girl.
Southern Cross Constellation
While I was growing up in a small town in Australia, I watched the stars and dreamed of seeing the rest of the world. Now that I have lived in Europe for years, I look back to that side of the world that lies under the Southern Cross constellation.
Simon Collings Surreal Absurd-Sampler
“As a teenager I loved the surreal humour of Monthy Python’s Flying Circus – a programme my parents hated … Python affected me to such an extent that my partner claims it has been the major influence of my life.”
The Gestures
Poetry is about something. It is neither wordplay for its own sake nor navelgazing. I believe with the ancients that “as above, so below”; but for me “below” is the self and “above” is history, which includes the future.
Miss-Communication
Funded by the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland, which commemorates Irish women of the past hundred years, on International Women’s Day Joanna Walsh’s AI, by her very existence, poses some questions: how does gender relate to language? How are women’s words and history recorded and commemorated? What is the economic status of the contemporary female ‘content provider’? And where, in our digital world, does creative autonomy reside?
Two Digital Paintings
Two digital paintings with surreal qualities
Cassandra Atherton Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My various visits to Japan and love of manga, anime and the kawaii aesthetic have influenced the neo-surreal aspects of my prose poetry…”
from FAILSAFE: a choreography
New from Scott Thurston, FAILSAFE is an ongoing series of choreographic prose poems: Amongst them I found behind whenever you remember: prepare a meal for God. A lighter touch, toy soldiers rescale. This edge, again, of how far to dress up, curate and present the desperate and contingent. Realised I’d interpreted space behind as moving backwards.
Pessoa’s Dream
Pessoa’s Dream” is a stream-of-consciousness poem that begins and ends as a reflection on Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and which, in between those reflections, emerges as a whistle-stop tour of literary and philosophical associations — James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau, Slavoj Zizek and Stefan Zweig all get a mention whilst René Guenon, although not mentioned by name, lingers in the periphery.
Jane Yeh Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I’m probably drawn to the surreal because I’m easily bored. When I’m in the process of writing a poem, I’m mainly trying to keep myself interested in each line and what might come next, so taking leaps of imagination or language are what I’ve found will most engage my attention.”
Indefatigable
These pieces form part of a project I'm currently working on in which I imagine myself as an island.
An Encounter
I always went to the edge of the woods when I needed to be alone. On the far side, before it dropped down to the railway line, there was a low dry-stone wall, crumbling away, that made the perfect seat. It was incredibly peaceful; you could hear yourself think, work things out in your head. Once an hour, there was a roar of the high-speed train from the city, like a round of applause.
Twisted, Crumpled
Twisted, Crumpled is a new story by C. D. Rose: No one knows what the man, who may have been a Danish film director or a French art dealer or a Ukrainian journalist, was doing in the Pallonetto, a neighbourhood rarely frequented by tourists even of the more intrepid kind. No one, victim and perp aside, saw the theft happen. The man had been walking along the seafront at Santa Lucia, it was suggested, and only ended up in the warren of the Pallonetto as he attempted to give chase to the tyke.
The never-ending quest…
Sign up to receive our free fortnightly newsletter-publication and occasionally a free book