Jake Levine Surreal-Absurd Sampler
The turn toward the surreal or the absurd, is the turn from tragedy into comedy. It’s not a matter of imagination, but a matter of perspective. The opposite side of the absurd, is that it is unbearable if we don’t imagine Sisyphus happy. All my poems are autobiographical. The mirror is unbearable. The surreal is that well I have to look down to capture my reflection. - Jake Levine
‘Where there is waiting, a language opens’: Susie Campbell’s The Sleeping Place, Reviewed by Stephen Sunderland
Stephen Sunderland Reviewed The Sleeping Place by Susie Campbell (Guillemot Press, 2023)
Nicola Winborn Reviews Toys for Telepaths by Stephen Nelson (Red Fox Press, 2023)
Nicola Winborn reviews Toys for Telepaths by Stephen Nelson (Red Fox Press, 2023).
SJ Fowler Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I first met Babs when I first met Babs in London. … I went into a shop on the Bethnal Green Road, surrounded by people pretending to be poets, and met her basically. I thought I had seen it all, but here was this purple cat…”
The Poetics of Sex in ‘The Bare Thing’ by Len Lukowski (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), Reviewed and Interviewed by JP Seabright
Len Lukowski, reviewed and interviewed by JP Seabright
Genesis
I believe prose poetry is a portal to opening people up to the idea of poetry. When it is surreal or absurd prose poetry, the reader is suddenly, God forbid, having fun with a form of poetry. vAs much as this applies to poetry and Mercurius, I think the same is true of the Bible, as we try to make meaningful and relevant ways to make it accessible to modern living.
Her Baroness Stripped Bare By The Bachelor, Even
The early Twentieth Century saw a glorious liberating explosion in the world of Art. And a lot of artists became very famous and very rich. But not all of them: my poem is a biographical sketch of a woman who was there at the start of this creative burst, responsible for a great deal of it, and yet whose name has mostly been forgotten.
Liberate the Future
‘Liberate the Future’ consists of flights of fantasy which may seem surreal or even satirical, but might better be thought as ingenious, unrestrained and concrete ways of thinking about alternative futures, and in the sections below, Katzeff offers readers a series of modest proposals for rewilding the moon, transplanting Hong Kong, taking mushrooms directly, and solving the coming housing crisis through more ambitious forms of clothing.
Sawako Nakayasu Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“At some point, as if there was some kind of tipping point, there seemed to be enough surreal aspects to the supposedly real world, which made it simply a more honest way to try to reckon with said world. In terms of poetic practices, it was Francis Ponge and his delightful prose poems that held open the door for me.”
dancing in the womb and its poetic of becoming: Susie Campbell on Rezia Wahid
Susie Campbell reviews Dancing in the Womb by Rezia Wahid (Hesterglock Press, 2022)
Evan Williams Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Where bodybuilding ended for me, writing began. I adopted what I think of as a Poetics of Silliness, which relies heavily on the Surreal. The Surreal for me is so deeply entangled with the Queer, not just because both are related to open expressions of joy, but because they each represent opportunities of relief.
Remains
These visual poems are made of remains. Remains is all what was left of what we don't use. Especially what remains of words and colors. Words that we no longer use, that turn into fragments and stammering. Words related to the rest of colors left unused in the tubes.
Satoshi Iwai Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Satoshi Iwai was born and lives in Kanagawa, Japan. He writes poems in English and in Japanese. His English work has appeared in Fairly Tale Review, Newfound, Into the Void, Phantom Drift, Outlook Springs, and elsewhere.
Shivani Mehta Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Shivani Mehta’s prose poems will be sure to stop you in your tracks. Magical and surreal, her block-form poetics weave fairytales with fables, origin myths with domesticity.
Waiting Rooms
INT. A well-lit room, sparsely
furnished. Time of day?
Unspecified.
Waiting Rooms, by Imogen Reid was originally published (on paper) by Hotel Magazine #3, then online by Zeno Magazine.
Stephen Sunderland Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“When I found Surrealism, I was attracted by its extremism – but whilst automatism is invigorating it’s also exhausting. I’m glad to have found other surrealist methods enabling me to ‘manifest’ my writing using chance…”
Heat and Money
When I came to “A Dream Within a Dream,” I felt both repelled and attracted not by the common thought that we are all characters in someone else’s dream but by the idea of a dream within a dream, suggesting to some the interminable repeating images in a mirror before and behind one.
Swag
Swag is part memoir fragment, part automatic-writing, typed and used in one of many explorations of images and words placed together without an obvious, explicit relationship.
Songlines in the City
For those armed with stories, the city can be a place as deep as the wild ever was. If you know your city, its legends, its soul, its songlines, then walking through it can be an almost hallucinogenic experience, every building, every alleyway, every pub prickling with life, yielding myths and associations.
A Review of James Knight’s (dis/re)membered (Steel Incisors, 2022) by Dan Caldwell
Dan Caldwell reviews James Knight’s (dis/re)membered (Steel Incisors, 2022).
The never-ending quest…
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