Visual Pantoums
Images Steph Morris Images Steph Morris

Visual Pantoums

Images

Visual and concrete poetry is often less linear than written poetry, more like a collage or an abstract painting, which you can start and finish anywhere within the frame. These, on the other hand, are collages which use ‘lines’ and ‘stanzas’, so you might want to start at the top left and work your way down to the bottom right.

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Beneath the Pavement
Society Ioan Marc Jones Society Ioan Marc Jones

Beneath the Pavement

Society

Ever since I was a teenager, friends and family and teachers and civil servants have told me that I think too much. I overthink, they all said, which made me think. People have used other terms to describe my condition – several doctors, for example, have called it anxiety.

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Life, Love & Gay Inhibitions In The Noughties
Society Ashley Mangtani Society Ashley Mangtani

Life, Love & Gay Inhibitions In The Noughties

Society

I suppose I'm an old romantic at heart. Even though I should know better, I still adhere to the old school notion of 'true love'. I tried deeply to dismiss it - telling myself it was all too complicated and that I couldn't possibly put my body through the angst that comes with it. It didn't work.

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A Star of Television and the Silver Screen
Fiction Douglas Cowie Fiction Douglas Cowie

A Star of Television and the Silver Screen

Fiction

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.

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The Room
Fiction Emily Hughes Fiction Emily Hughes

The Room

Fiction

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.

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A Conversation with a Conversation
Poetry of Life Jamie Macleod Bryden and Thomas Helm Poetry of Life Jamie Macleod Bryden and Thomas Helm

A Conversation with a Conversation

Poetry of Life

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.

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Post-Partum Document
Fiction Cathleen Davies Fiction Cathleen Davies

Post-Partum Document

Fiction

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.

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Hilda Sheehan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Surreal-Absurd Vik Shirley Surreal-Absurd Vik Shirley

Hilda Sheehan Surreal-Absurd Sampler

Surreal-Absurd

“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.”

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