A Star of Television and the Silver Screen
A new story by Douglas Cowie: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re particularly pleased to have a special guest flying with us today, star of television and the silver screen—” And here he said the name of some actor, or actress, I supposed, but I couldn’t be sure because it sounded muffled, or at least I didn’t understand. A few people clapped. Heads began to turn around, looking for this celebrity, although why they thought he or she would be sitting back in economy class, I don’t know.
Water vapour hangs like memory in the air: a review of Alton M. Dapanas’ Towards a Theory on City Boys (Newcomer Press) by Cat Chong
Cat Chong reviews Alton Dapanas’ autotheoretical prose poems, Towards a Theory on City Boys (Newcomer Press).
When You are but a Breath of Light
Five poems by Douglas Cole.
The Room
I look outside the window, see two strange stars in the Milky Way, unexpectedly hot and covered in ash. This is not what she is looking at, obviously. It’s what I’m looking at. She is looking out at the roof tiles, studying the slanting afternoon light. She finds the impression of the sunlight on the roof tiles quite particular, quite beautiful, and it inspires in her an ache, the kind one might experience when one’s entire body is racked with fever, a fever-ache, heavy and consuming, and she can’t decide what might satisfy this ache, possibly codeine or ice cream or a walk or a nap or a shot of dark rum with lime and sugar syrup, or possibly just really horny sex, but she does’t know which because her senses are hitting her up with this aimless ache: all of her best wants hurtling at her, meteoric.
A Conversation with a Conversation
A Conversation with a Conversation is a collaboration between Thomas Helm and Jamie Macleod Bryden. It is, first and foremost, the document of an afternoon well spent in Jardins Laribal, Barcelona. Images of the park - a statue of a women, a font where the water spurts out of a god’s head, pools of water dribbling into other pools of water - somehow found their way into the text.
Mike Ferguson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“A significant period mainly writing found prose poems brought me closest to a sustained absurdist style – the random connections of found content – but being arbitrary and staccato, they lacked the more usual storytelling…”
Laura Tansley’s Notes to Self (Trickhouse Press)
Laura Tansley’s Notes to Self documents an imagined future whilst preparing for the end of the present moment, and the rebirth of an entirely different one.
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.
The never-ending quest…
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