Post-Partum Document
Her little blue-eyed boy, that’s what her friends called him, and Iris decided she’d best adopt that nickname too because she hadn’t thought of one herself yet. She just called her baby ‘Nick’. She didn’t think that he looked like a Nicholas, although he did look remarkably like his father and, as his father was also called Nicholas she supposed that, actually, he must. Remarkable really was the word for it. They had the same square jaw, the same beady eyes, the same screwed-up mouth, always so small unless he was bawling which set her teeth on edge.
Five Important Female Latin American Poets
We are pleased to present five of the most important voices in the poetry written over the last 60 years in Latin America: Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Piedad Bonnett, (Colombia) Yolanda Pantin (Venezuela), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Rossella Di Paolo (Peru).
Hilda Sheehan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I spend a lot of time trying to work things out only to find that I can’t work things out - there’s weird stuff everywhere so we may as well simplify it to bring about some clarity. The world is brutal and careless. What fascinates me is the challenge of normalising fantastical ideas and Frances and Martine gave me a dialogue to explore that.”
Extract from Seven Steeples
An extract from Sara Baume’s new novel, Seven Steeples: THE MOUNTAIN WAS full of miniature eyes. There were the yellow discs of long-eared owls, the purblind blots of pygmy shrews, the immobile domes of bluebottles, the glinting black gems of brown rats.
Holy Water
I am not sure how I first heard that a monkey had escaped from the zoo, a mandrill to be exact. I had been in my new condominium no more than a week and planned on inviting Susie to move in with me at the first opportune moment, perhaps at a violin concert I mentioned a few days earlier.
Fill the Earth
Fill the Earth is an off-beat short story by Anne Rouse.
Jeremy Over Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I’m not sure why I persist in associating absurdity with happiness when the concept is rooted in death and when a human induced sixth mass extinction has recently upped the absurdity stakes significantly. But here we are. ‘Now for lunch’ as Ron Padgett writes at the end of his poem ‘The Death Deal’.”
Our World: Merged
‘Our World: Merged’ is an extract from Lynne Bryan’s memoir Iron Man, published by Salt, 2021. The extract contains four of seventeen fictional letters to artists that Lynne uses in Iron Man to unpick her thoughts and feelings in relation to her disabled father and his prostheses, a pair of wooden crutches and a leg iron.
Found-word Collage Poems
These visual poems are from an ongoing series of collages (2400+) built from phrases created unintentionally through the accident of magazine page design. Each contiguous fragment of text (roughly the equivalent of a poetic line) is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax. The text is not altered (except for the occasional deletion of prefixes, suffixes, or punctuation) and includes no attributable phrases. The lines of each collage are, in most cases, sourced from different magazines.
Kathmandu Oracle
In “Kathmandu Oralcle” I had no idea where this thought of finding a penny on a street would lead, and that it lead from Brooklyn to Kathmandu was a great surprise to me.
Aase Berg Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Is it an icy cold, airy, high-blue glacier atmosphere? Or an underwater world of deepblue breathing sounds? I don’t understand how it works, I maybe have a highly-functioning tendency for hallucination, but when I write it’s like I sleepwalk and suddenly find myself in that place.”—Aase Berg”
Extract from The Large Door
An extract from Jonathan Gibbs’ novel The Large Door: The painting itself was not large, but in its heavy frame it seemed so. The wood of the frame was the colour of old church pews, with thin grooves to it that caught and held the light in long vertical lines. It was not the only painting in the room – there was a miniature on the wall by the door to the landing, a floral composition of some kind – but this was the one that drew the eye.
Jorge Eduardo Eielson and his Visible Song
In Mercurius, we recently published a feature on five outstanding, living Latin American poets. Today I wish to present you with another name: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who is fascinating not only for his poetry, but also his plastic work.
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.
The never-ending quest…
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