Sascha A. Akhtar Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The surreal and the absurd are the twin axes along which the expanse of my work may well be plotted. I would say my introduction to Salvador Dali at a young age had a profound effect on my ideas of the imagination and what forms it could and indeed must produce…”
Famine: An Artwork
With God, the dirty ould bodach, running around in ditches spying on us, my childhood was a very watched event. The concept of privacy didn’t hit me (and it was a good schkelp across the face) until much later, and when it did hit (in my early adulthood) I was able to identify those scratchy doubts I’d had as a kid as privacy’s absence. A bodach in every step, God was one helluvanopponent. He was the demon that I battled right from the beginning, right from when I was able to form a memorable thought. Think Jam. Lovely. Suffer. The basics.
Food.
Thwart.
Thomas Helm Surreal-Absurd Sampler
For me, writing surreal-absurd poetry is a way of sifting through the unconscious and encountering things that feel important there. Often the best images are those that feel all too real despite their obvious artifice.
Happy New Year Mr. President Episode III: Leviticus Revisited
Satire with an inkling of the infinite. A spiritual journey, a metaphysical quest, a labyrinth without a centre, you name 'em, they'll tick' em.
GenderFux by Jem Henderson, Jonathan Kinsman and JP Seabright (Nine Pens, 2022): Reviewed by Pragya Suman
Pragya Suman reviews GenderFux by Jem Henderson, Jonathan Kinsman and JP Seabright (Nine Pens, 2022).
Speaking in Tongues
The moment an Englishman opens his mouth, another Englishman despises him… An essay on how dialect-bias pervades the UK’s social hierarchy and what growing up with the “wrong” accent can mean.
Communion
Good poems traffic in realities that are strange, ambiguous, and (at times) incommunicable. Since the spiritual realm (as I understand it) is strange, ambiguous, and incommunicable, maybe poems are our best windows into that place.
The Tower of Babel
In the summer of 2010 I found myself collecting and downloading reproductions of works of art that referenced the Tower of Babel which I pasted into a new sketchbook. By the end of the summer, I had painted a series of 12 towers on A1 paper, another 12 ‘Small Towers’, this time around a foot square in format, and a number of studies and sketchbook pages on the same theme.
Interviews with Nine Poets
Mercurius editor Nidia Hernandez takes the poetic pulse of 2022 by interviewing nine poets at the Miami Book Fair: Robert Pinksy, Victoria Redel, John Freeman, Su Cho, Sherry Shenoda, Diane Thiel, Kemi Alabi, Shelley Puhak, and Peter Balakian. Listening to these remarkable voices is an excellent way of wrapping up 2022 and ushering in 2023…
This Voice
This Voice is a multi-media work by Andrew Hodgson. Presented here are: This Voice (1), an audio-visual work commissioned for Humber Mouth - Hull Literature Festival, 2021, and the text for a companion piece, This Voice (2).
Blanca Varela
“Blanca Varela is neither pleased with her discoveries nor drunk with her songs. With the instinct of the true poet, she knows when to be silent” - Octavio Paz
Noir
Noir is a new piece from Imogen Reid, first published in Praxis, Eds: Andrew Hodgson, Chris Clarke and Rosie Snajdr, Manchester, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021.
MUEUM
Mercurius is delighted to share a chapter from SJ Fowler’s novella MUEUM. A work of ludic menace, a puzzle without pieces, MUEUM pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.
Réka Nyitrai Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The surreal has always played a pivotal role in my writing, essentially as a tool / strategy for dealing with suppressed emotions; uninviting reality, and unfulfilled dreams and desires. My poems afford an opportunity to disrupt the everyday with the unusual.
Go On, extract
An exclusive extract from Tania Hershman’s debut novel: "How to tell your story? “I want to talk,” the Author says on page 1. The Narrator who has been assigned to assist her knows that what is needed now is permission. “Go on,” says the Narrator - and a book is born.
Weaving threads and following tangents, Tania Hershman’s debut novel, a hybrid “fictional memoir-in-collage”, tells one story and many stories: how is it to be a woman moving happily alone through the world? Who are you if not in relation to others? A woman walks through the cemetery, talking to the dead. A class of schoolgirls grapples with what anger is and might be. A baby is left by scientists in a forest. Someone claims to be your grandmother.
As the Author writes her way into and through what she needs to say, the Narrator watches her develop and blossom and wonders what will happen when they reach the end. Go on."
The Climate and the Dreamers
Two poems
THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS extract
THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS is an anti-novel, a modern epic poem and method-poem in action. Using umpteen numerical and circadian constraints, melville spent one year harvesting and re-planting imperatives, assertions, instructions and ‘facts’ – so you don’t have to! The language of corporate, cultural and state instruction is our new lingua franca, but what, and how, are these instructions instructing us? Read this book to find out. A must-read for anyone who exists today, or tomorrow.
Excavating Kafka
My handmade collages are intended as a rebuke to the lifeless perfection of Photoshopped images. They are also intended to provoke an authentic response by combining images in a way that challenges old habits of seeing.
Thank you but how am I free?
I am a free and full of hope.
Although.
In Twigs Nor Sky
This selection of wee poems moves through English countryside, from winter into spring. There are so many forgotten gods & demons hiding in England’s landscapes ... and now – after the great ‘transformation’ caused by a tiny dangerous organism, and as our planet’s weathers change ever more quickly – these presences – through all earth’s landscapes – seem to be becoming more noticeable again.
The never-ending quest…
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