Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 22
the grey scale, a rain of earth, a detailed intimacy, a Tennysonian absence, and much more
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: the grey scale, a rain of earth, a detailed intimacy, a Tennysonian absence, and much more. Enjoy.
A walk in Parc Angrignon yesterday felt like a respite from the extremely difficult time in which we’re living. The world is screaming and yet so many are silenced, afraid of what will happen if they voice the truth or even simply say what they feel, as human beings. It’s a time when truth itself is under attack, as well as the institutions that teach people how to think critically, how to discern the truth for themselves, and express it in a coherent and rational way. A time when we are witnesses every single day to horrific violence perpetrated on the most innocent of victims, when sheer cruelty, corruption, utter disregard for the most vulnerable, and endless lies are becoming normalized. A time when being a journalist, a doctor, an aid worker, or a foreign student has never been more dangerous. A time when our own options for living with integrity seem smaller and smaller, and, as another Substack author writes, one longs for retreat from the madness:
Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing.
Not dying.
Just logging off.
Getting a job no one cares about.
Growing tomatoes.
Writing poems in the margins of a notebook no one reads.
Not as a failure.
But as a kind of freedom.
For those of us who do write, it becomes harder and harder to know what to say.
Beth Adams, A Letter from Canada, at the end of May
You said if we kept on, worked hard enough,
we’d feel warmth from the centre of the earth,
that we’d know by laying our hands flat
on the bottom of our freshly dug hole.
You told me Australia was right beneath us.
It all seemed so worth digging for.
I pictured us emerging in a different country,
staying there until teatime,
coming back to tell Mum.Each time you pressed your palm to feel for heat
you looked hopeful
silently inviting me to copy.
But I only ever felt the cold damp
of earthworms.Sue Finch, Turning the Calendars Over
My daughter asked to read some of my love poems recently. I tried to find some that were understandable and appropriate for an eleven-year-old. Not surprising that this was difficult, but what did surprise me was that they didn’t feel like love poems when I read them, though when I wrote them they felt so overly emotional.
I struggled to find one that felt a good example of how I write love poems, but I guess they all are. I don’t gush or really even praise the other as there is no particular person in mind. I focus on the moment and the whirlwind of emotions I’m feeling. There is often a sense of sadness on the edges, that the flush will fade, that reality will set in. So they don’t always feel like the giddy heights of love poems, but maybe the more realistic confusion of love.
I read a few of my poems out to my daughter and while she didn’t get most of them, they’re maybe a bit thick linguistically and not aimed at pre-teens so she was ok with that, but it did open a nice conversation for how love is such a big emotion that it’s confusing and often leaves us feeling very overwhelmed. How it’s important to express how we feel even if it doesn’t always make sense to others. It’s part of understanding how we fit into the world. If she walked away with that sense of it’s ok to express being overwhelmed however and whenever we need to, then I feel pretty good about my poems.
Gerry Stewart, Expressing Big Emotions
I just found this piece and thought I’d share it today. It is a recording from a live performance at Spoken Beat Night, Bimhuis, Amsterdam, June 2016. The evening was totally improvised and LIVE, a beautiful combination of spoken word and poetry, art and drawings, and jazz performances with the always incredible Shabaka Hutchings and the Spoken Beat band.
This piece feels like a calm voice from another time to me. I love Amsterdam and love to go there, to visit friends and perform. Every time I go I feel rather nostalgic for the summers in 1990s inter-railing around Europe. This poem really captures that moment when you stop and feel it, time shifting, changes occurring, the moment passing and a new moment beginning. I feel it now, the tide turning, I feel a shift, this poem reminds me of that and a young and fearless hope.
This poem was published in my first collection ‘Fishing in The Aftermath’ by Burning Eye Books in 2014. I reckon the poem was written almost 20 years ago and I can picture the bar where I wrote it, it’s a glorious gay bar, overlooking the water, oh you know the one … ah how the years are flying by…
Salena Godden, All We Can Do Is Hope
Another memoir I’ve enjoyed very much recently is Authentic Embellishments, by poet Joshua Davis. Since I work as a book designer, I get the opportunity to read a lot of terribly good small press titles well before the general public, and this one hit my desk at just the right time, I feel, as I struggle with several kinds of interconnected grief—that I may lose my mother sooner rather than later, that our shared genetic condition could mean a similar journey for me or my sisters, and the regret and loss I feel over these pockets of time where I can’t live the way I wish to because I’m needed more urgently elsewhere. Some of this grief is current, and some of it is oddly anticipatory? And yet “grief” does feel like the best word.
I’ve wondered whether my attraction to found materials, both visuals and sound, has to do with these feelings of loss. I can say that collecting the sound effects I used in the collages was directly related to the experience of missing them in the world, so maybe?
Josh beautifully traces the paths of loss, absence, and abandonment in his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, husband, and child. “A life saved by poetry,” the subtitle promises, and the moments where Lucille Clifton or Ruth Stone appear (or are found? he was definitely seeking!) in his life to guide him emphasize to me, again, how keen a tool art can be for comfort and survival. Yes.Shanna Compton, INKY 2: Room Tone in June + On Loss & Found Materials
My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories leaving and arriving as unpredictably as fish to the surface of a pond. If she goes out of her house for a walk, she can’t always find her way back. If she wakes up after a nap, she might think a new day has started and begin making breakfast. She knows there’s a number you call in an emergency, but usually can’t recall what that number is. She has forgotten much of our family and most of her friends. She has only once forgotten me, her only child, and then only briefly—but it’s a sign of what’s to come.
I should be precise: my mother’s conscious mind is disappearing, not her body or her unconscious mind—the mind of dreams and reflexes; the mind our conscious mind tries futilely to claim dominion over. For now her body is very much present, and for her age, thriving. When I take walks with her, I hardly have to slow my pace. When she accompanies my two year old daughter to story time at the local library, she sits on the library carpet with the kids and young parents, then pulls herself up to standing at the end, to the amazement of all present. This is not how I have come to understand death’s arrival, especially here in our death-averse society, where we whisk away bodies and scrub rooms clean, buffeting ourselves from the reality of what’s happened with expressions like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.” My father died of cancer when I was eleven, his mind sharp up until the final weeks. The day he died, surrounded by family in our living room, I stood by his body and held his hand, still not quite cold. Soon after, the paramedics took him away and I never saw my father’s body again. My mother has been dying for years but her body is, for now, undiminished.
And my body, too, persists, though my conscious mind doesn’t understand quite how. While it worries over prescriptions and home healthcare workers and nursing homes, my subconscious is drumming up lines of poems, or the sentences that I’ve cobbled into this essay. I sometimes find myself with a pen in my hand, with no memory of picking it up. And my conscious mind asks the obvious questions: Why? And why now? Why persist with poems and stories and all this fancy language in the face of unavoidable loss? They’re questions I’ve asked myself often over the years, with no final answer arriving beyond the knowledge that not once in my life has my devotion to writing been a conscious choice. All I did was read, innocently at first, oblivious to what I was getting myself into.
Rob Taylor, “Why? And Why Now?”: On Poetry and Companionship
Storyteller Poetry Review has just published 5 of my poems about my wonderful mother-in-law. Some have been published before; some are first-timers. My thanks to editor Sharon Knutson for this opportunity to share an extraordinary life.
Sarah Russell, My Mother-in-Law Boby Clariana
I had been revising som old poems of late, and after some feedback on one it dawned on me that I am pissing about, and that I need to focus on newer stuff. So I am. A new draft emerged this week, and two very recent things are shaping up nicely. I need to go back to the piles of notes I have and perhaps, just perhaps a collection might have started to take shape by the end of the year. A long way to go yet, so no getting ahead of myself, but there feels like light at the end of the torch I intend to take into the tunnel for the first time in a while.
Mat Riches, A jumping off point
How do you build a poetry community? Is it a bit like gardening, in that you have to work at it slowly over time and then all of the sudden, blooms everywhere, and hummingbirds? One thing I want to do is to prioritize time with poets online and in-person, catching up over coffee or the phone, or having people over. Sometimes, it takes a lot of energy, but I think it’s worth it. Even this blog, or social media, can be part of building community. I think we writers work better when we have community. We need to support each other and recognize each other and shout “good job” when someone gets good news and “so sorry” when they get bad news.
Despite setbacks, I did write a poem this week, and I started submitting again. I’m editing my book for sending out again. But there has been a tick-tock in my ear lately (and not just because of the ear infection). It’s how fast time passes these days, and losses that come with getting older, and the feeling that my time is limited.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Ups and Downs, Birds and Blooms, and Building Poetry Community
Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I always have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain. The facts! The worlds. The perspectives from people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet or places I will never go. Thoughts, philosophies. Lives lived. Lives! Life!
I love holding books. I love re-reading the books I love. I love taking photographs of books! Books, I love you. I love watching a movie based on a book I love and then going back to the book and loving it all over again in new ways. I love talking about a book with someone and they saw something I didn’t. I love taking a single sentence from a book and typing it out and saying it and sharing it. I love being regularly astonished by how words spark one against the other and how sentences somehow contain a style that you have never until then come across. I love how a sentence by one author will resound and then take you to another author and you will learn to hear echoes and rhythms.
I love words. I love sentences.
In an epigraph to a chapter titled “What is a Sentence” in Jan Mieszkowski’s book Crises of the Sentence, John Banville says, “The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.”
The greatest invention is still the sentence. The book, another great invention. Best technology. Poems, another great invention.
Fernando Pessoa:
“I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.”Pessoa, my soul to your soul.
Shawna Lemay, The Greatest Invention
This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?
Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks#32: Try a Poem Staple Gun
As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.
I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.
As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.
Matthew Paul, On The Last Corinthians
Thanks to being published by a small press with an open attitude, I persuaded them to use a photo I’d created myself.
I took this photo in my living room (the colour on the wall is French Grey from Farrow and Ball, in case you’re interested!) My idea was to assemble a ‘still life’ in the Dutch tradition of ‘vanitas’ paintings. ‘Vanitas’ being the genre of still life that is supposed to suggest the brevity of one’s time on this planet, and the futility of everything we strive for, since it has to end in death.
This isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, trust me! What I gathered together were pieces of memorabilia, items referenced in the poems, signifiiers… all arranged in such a way that I hope engenders a feeling of a life lived, in all its messiness, chaos, mistakes, serendipity, quirkiness and yes, beauty.
If you look closely you’ll see a Korean Coca-Cola bottle (I used to collect Coca-Cola cans and bottles from all the countries I visited through work!), burnt-out candles and a half-drunk glass of wine (I’ll leave you to decide on the significance of these), rotting fruit (=decay) and a fox’s skull (mostly in pieces). Skulls, and timepieces, are very common ‘vanitas’ tropes. There’s no clock or watch here, but I have included pages from work diaries, a (laminated) production timeline (we had a new product range every quarter), my old Filofax from the 1990s, even some pages from one of my teenage diaries. There are also photos of me as a Brownie and later as a jaded employee posing for yet another visa application. And let’s not gloss over the blister pack of paracetamol. Pills, childhood terrors, stupid work schedules and endless long-haul trips are well represented in the poems. As well as the internet, computers, magnolia flowers (artificial in this case) and ‘burning the candle at both ends’.
Robin Houghton, The Mayday Diaries cover art: what’s it all about?
Many thanks to Arts ATL for selecting Wonder & Wreckage as one of its 13 must-read poetry collections for National Poetry Month. I was in fine company with Beth Gylys, Andred Jurjevic, and Elly Bookman. See the list here.
And also many thanks to friend and fine poet Steven Reigns, who recommended Wonder & Wreckage in his selections for National Poetry Month that appeared on The Poetry Foundation website. See the list here.
Wonder & Wreckage is also a nominee for the annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards, which will be announced in June. I’m among a very crowded field, so not hopeful about my chances, especially since the great Alice Friman is in the running.
Collin Kelley, Wrapping up May
On the very first day of June five years ago, this little book dropped into the world in the form of a box of copies left downstairs. Chicago was literally on fire from protests (which I still think were outside agitators, rather than the Chicagoans who had been protesting Friday and most of Saturday without incidence.) What would follow was curfews that lasted a couple of weeks and increased policing on Michigan Ave for a couple more years. In the thick of Covid lockdowns, that morning, I sat in a zoom meeting, in which a bunch of librarians fretted over return protocols coming a month later despite not a single one of them actually returning to the office during the remaining year and a half I still worked there after. I wound up texting my boss to say I was taking the day off and depression napping, but later I went to fetch the cat litter downstairs and found my newest book. It was a moment that should have been one of celebration, but I wasn’t feeling it. In the coming months I did my best to market the book, making my first video poems and web content, but it was hard to get traction. In retrospect, it was [the] last traditionally published book I published before moving on to issuing titles myself a year later (after what I like to call now the “Poetry Mid-Life Crises of 2020” ).
This bones of SEX & VIOLENCE started in early 2015 with the blond joke poems, and through 2016 with the Plath centos gleaned from lines in ARIEL. It continued through slasher movie fragments and what was initially J’s Valentine’s love poem series from 2017, but which broadened over the next few months and took on a life of its own. Right after I lost my mom, I sat down to send it in time for the end of the month deadline BLP had for new submissions. When the acceptance came during the early spring, I sat and cried at my desk over not being able to tell her first thing.
The time since that first spring without her and lockdowns/riots to now, five years later, always feels like it is collapsing in on itself.
Kristy Bowen, book birthday | sex & violence
“Fierce” and “fearsome” offer the perfect segue to the Taylor Swift component of how I’m channeling my rage this spring. Ever since hearing “Look What You Made Me Do” in the opening scene of the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale series, I’ve had it on repeat. I’ve been loud about it. Very loud. (Sorry not sorry!)
I’ve declared it my twisted summer anthem of 2025. Or my anthem of twisted summer. Or the summer of twisted me. Let it be a season of retribution. A season of reclamation. Let it be a season of taking back our power. A season of kingdoms crumbling and artists rising. […]
I’m happy to say I’ve also reached the defiance stage in what has been a season (or seasons) of rejection for my poetry manuscript. Over the last three years or so, my Gertie manuscript has been rejected dozens of times, while also receiving a handful of finalist nods.
The most recent rejection — which came with a lovely note from the editor about making the final round of consideration — arrived in early May, a couple days after I returned from a writing retreat at Mass MoCA. The press that had it was not only one of my dream presses. It was also the last one to respond from a big submission push I did last spring and summer. And since I had paused submitting and revising after that, it meant that Gertie was no longer a contender for any reading period or contest anywhere.
It also meant that if Gertie was to get published, I’d need to jump back into the whole process, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I spent some time entertaining the fear that the last and latest rejection signaled that book publishing wasn’t ever going to be for me.
I indulged the idea that there simply wasn’t a place in the world for my work, but I took lots of deep breaths, gave myself a good talking to, and consulted my writing community. And … wait for it…
I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time …Defiance has always been one of my strengths, and I plan to keep fighting for Gertie. It’s partly because I believe in the book. It’s also because, despite constantly wasting energy entertaining negative self talk, somewhere deep down I believe in myself.
Carolee Bennett, Artmaking as Pleasure: “Uncontainable, Unmanageable”
I had a student who is now a Very
Famous and Important Poet; I don’t
think she remembers me much
anymore, if at all. I had a teacher
who said, It’s really about who you know.
But I still believe in the poems I want
to write, believe in the air I breathe,
the tiny electric pulse which begins
as a prickle somewhere in the brain
or sensorium, informing me I need
to sink into the shag carpet of that
moment and stop asking only the logical
questions; because then a trapdoor
might open and who knows what bright,
surprising universe I might fall into?Luisa A. Igloria, Partial Self-portrait as Poet, with Novelty Cakes
My husband and I recently visited David Austin Roses in Shropshire. It set me thinking about why I love roses: the scent, the sweet-shop colours and the silkiness of the petals. But they also have thorns and are beloved by insects such as earwigs. This links to my latest poetry collection, Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024), where the main theme is ‘beautiful things have inner horrors’.
We do have a small Tudor style rose garden within our back garden, with box hedges and some David Austen roses, and others that need a little work, pruning etc. We also have a few which were standard roses but have reverted to wild roses, and are far too large for this miniature parterre. So our visit was partly scoping out replacements. I liked the Olivia rose, and hope to order bare rooted in the correct season. I can’t see a rose without sniffing it for its scent, and will only buy scented ones. Everywhere I go I see roses and apply my nose to them, and have done since I was a small child. They are indeed ‘olfactory delights’ (quoting one of my own lines there). […]
Your parents’ tangled minds
are clogged with memories, resurfacing
as they approach their nineties.
We have assumed control.Safe in their new apartment, they cling
to routine, repeat old stories, laugh,
are mostly thankful for our care: roses
late flowering against the dark of winter.Angela Topping, David Austin Roses
[E]astern Pennsylvania finally moderated its weather enough that I got the weeds and the seeds and transplants more or less under control this past week–“control” being a general term subject to, well, Nature. The peonies bloomed gorgeously on schedule, as did the nefarious multiflora roses and Russian olives that plague the hedgerow. The catbirds and Eastern kingbirds are back; the robins’ first brood has hatched; the orioles are insistent in the walnut trees and brilliant in the garden, chasing the barn swallows. I’m not doing much writing, though I drafted one or two beginnings of poems. Outdoors takes precedence–not that I can’t write out of doors, I often do so. But poems can wait in a way the garden cannot.
And, speaking of poems (and Pennsylvania), I returned from my trip to find this Keystone Poetry anthology awaiting: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09990-3.html–the followup to 2005’s Common Wealth anthology, also edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple.
The new anthology, 20 years after the initial one, has poems by about 180 poets–yes, I am one of them–covering the corners and the center of the Keystone State. I like it even better than the first collection, and it is clear the editors learned much from the experience of curating poems and creating a cohesive “experience” of the regions. Granted, since I know both of the editors personally and appreciate their poetry and their visions, I may be biased. But that’s okay. Objectively, I truly get how huge an undertaking this was and how well it has turned out. For educators, there is a section at the close of the anthology full of suggestions for reading, writing critically, and writing creatively based on this anthology, and even in comparison with the previous one. As both editors are college professors who teach creative writing and critical writing, these appendices are well-thought out and worthwhile.
I miss the aridity of New Mexico, which seems to benefit my overall health. And I miss my daughter immensely. But springtime in eastern PA has many compensations, not the least of which are blooming even as I write.
Ann E. Michael, Back in PA
I think Palgrave’s decision to exclude contemporary work – he would not ‘anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries’ – was an excellent one. Absolutely no one can ever assess its merit, because it hasn’t had time to accrue any yet. Not that this stops us doing it. Young poets are always certain they live in a golden age; if it were left to them, they would include few poets beyond their brilliantly relevant coevals. But what they imagine the intrinsic value of their poetry is often just its extrinsic attitude, which is half the point of young poets in the first place: to take a stand, and demand a corrective to the inequities and distortions of the establishment. Today, ‘identity’ is still the main game in town, just as ‘class’ and gay visibility were in my day; in my mentors’ day, it was feminist corrective, and in their mentors’, anti-metropolitanism and fighting for the representation of the regions and the Celtic fringe. While one’s day passes quickly enough – the identity-obsession will eventually find its level, like everything before it – it always leaves the year ahead looking different in prospect. In time, I believe things tend to be changed for the better and the fairer.
Old poets, on the other hand, know that poetry has never been in worse shape, and would exclude everybody, bar themselves and their one remaining friend. I’m not even too sure about him, to be honest. But for those reasons, the young and the old can make poor anthologists. The young are too short-sighted and the old too long. Those who enjoy the brief, bifocal wisdom of the mid-river perspective (a mixed metaphor which seems to have conjured a specky fly fisher in waders; my apologies) know that the truth always lies in balance. You want a book which looks both forwards and backwards, because those are the books truest to their own time.
Tennyson, Palgrave’s great friend and advisor, wisely insisted that his own poetry be left out of the Treasury – a stroke of genius, because he knew would put the kibosh on Palgrave using any other contemporary work. Had he done so, it would have done nothing but draw attention to Tennyson’s absence. In vetoing his own inclusion, Tennyson underwrote the Treasury’s own longevity and success. […]
My favourite version of the do-I-put-me-in dilemma is actually a Tennysonian absence: The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry was edited by my favourite living poet, Paul Muldoon, a choice Faber must have instantly regretted. In it, Paul more or less explored the set theory complexities of self-absence. He had already made the most insanely Palgravian choice – a mere ten poets were included in the book; but Muldoon then doubled down on his honourable self-omission by not just leaving himself out, but annihilating his own existence altogether. Instead of an introduction, there was an excerpt from an interview with Louis MacNeice. Given that even back then Muldoon was, by common consent, one of the most important living Irish poets, the book was now rendered self-evidently and gratingly incomplete. The cleverness of this almost situationist piece of publishing is so Muldoonian I could spend an essay unpacking it. But it remains a brilliant anthology, in the true sense, I think – provided you read it with a copy of Muldoon’s Selected in the other hand.
Don Paterson, ‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of Francis Palgrave and the Golden Treasury – Part II
If you enjoy reading poetry and are, at least in principle, interested in reading contemporary poetry and responses to it in “real time” — following poets as they publish new material, getting a sense of new directions and experiments as they evolve — then the obvious thing to do is to subscribe to a handful of poetry magazines. There are several splendid online poetry magazines now, but I still much prefer to read both poetry and criticism in print. This is partly because I just don’t remember poems I read on a screen in the same way. I don’t believe you have really read a poem at all if you’ve only read it once — and certainly, from a poet’s perspective, you haven’t really “succeeded” unless your reader comes back to your poem time and again. Online venues are quick and convenient ways of getting a taste of many writers, but it’s hard to revisit things. You can’t annotate or turn down pages as you can with a physical book or magazine, even saved links often go dead, and the lack of manual interaction I think also impedes memory.
So for me, at least, printed poetry magazines still matter. But if you’re new to reading poetry magazines, or even if you’re quite experienced at it but fancy a change, it can be hard to know where to start. Most print magazines, unsurprisingly, only offer a very small amount of their content for free online, and very few libraries and bookshops now carry them so the opportunities for browsing are limited. (At least in the UK; I see them more often in France.) And it’s hard to find “reviews” of magazines that aren’t aimed primarily at people thinking of submitting, rather than those who are potential readers.
I’ve written reviews of three of the magazines I receive regularly before (Poetry Review, Interpret and the French rbl), and I’ve put the links to those pieces at the end of this post. But today I thought I’d take a look at three very good magazines, all of which I value and read loyally, and all of which print a good deal of prose as well as poetry, with an eye for their differences — what might attract you to one of these over the others if you are a potential new subscriber. These are the spring (i.e. most recent) issues of the long-running PN Review; Poetry London (also well established, but with a recent change of poetry editor); and the quite new, and still evolving, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. All three print poetry, literary essays and reviews (of poetry) in broadly similar proportions.
Victoria Moul, Poetry magazines: three spring issues
I’m always on the look out for books that deepen my understanding of creating poetry and am eternally grateful to writers such as Ted Kooser (The Poetry Repair Manual) and Steve Kowit (In the Palm of Your Hand), who supported my early attempts at writing myself. Last year I was moved to congratulate Isabelle Kenyon of Fly on the Wall Press for the publication of a truly inspirational book (The Process of Poetry) in which British poets of the stature of Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Liz Lochhead and Gillian Clarke reflected on the development of one of their poems through discussion with editor Rosanna McGlone. I was, therefore, particularly excited by the news that McGlone was working on a sequel, an Australian version, called The Making of a Poem (5 Islands Press, 2025) and wanted to review it. […]
Whilst there is some commonality in the different poets’ approaches, such as in their shared view of the importance of reading others’ work and in their willingness to experiment, there is diversity too and, at times, contradictions. John Kinsella, for example, does not believe in giving up on poems, even if they are not working.
‘I’ve never abandoned a poem. If a poem doesn’t work, it gets rewritten and reworked. If I’m doubtful about what I’ve said, the piece then becomes a questioning and an investigation of that doubt.’
Whereas Sarah Holland-Batt, admits to giving up on poems that she feels aren’t progressing
‘All the time I have poems that I feel won’t work and I just let them go.’
Such contradictions are inevitable in a book that seeks to provide insights into the highly individualistic practice of writing poetry. As The Making of a Poem is not a simplistic handbook on the dos and don’ts of poetry writing, the reader must use the poet’s different accounts to reflect critically upon their own practice. Some insights will confirm and some will challenge their approaches and through that challenge produce the potential for its development.
Three of the insights that have led me to reflect on my own practice are: Jaya Savige’s statement that: ‘If I feel I’m getting too confessional, I try to rebalance things by banning myself from the first-person pronoun for the next few poems;’ Mark Tredinnick’s advice to his students that ‘ the poem you’re writing isn’t about yourself; it’s about ourselves;’ and Bella Li encouragement to ’trust in your particularity: the subjects you’re interested in, the forms that you want to use…don’t try to change what you’re doing to suit some sense of an audience.’ I have no doubt the lessons other readers will take away from engaging with such poets will be different. That is the beauty of this book: there will be something for everyone!
Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Making of a Poem’ edited by Rosanna McGlone
The latest from Birmingham, Alabama-based poet, fiction writer and editor Alina Stefanescu, and the first collection I’ve properly gone through of hers, is the remarkable My Heresies (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2025), a lyric exploration of being and becoming, of family histories and geographic shifts. “The first word wasn’t love, was it?” she writes, within the first poem of the two-part “Cosmologies,” “It was this once that sat upon a time we can’t locate / in physics. It was the science of bread / being broken and eaten. // I am still terrible at division.” My Heresies is a collection of big, complicated emotions, cultural collision and a fierce intelligence, composed with such a delicate and careful ease of the line. “I, too, would appreciate / being courted at the leveling / of the sacred.” she writes, as part of the short poem “Little Things: A Ring,” “If I can’t partake of the trifecta, / I will settle for that flaming / thing in the angel’s right hand.” The poems are expansive and intimate, containing the whole world and the author’s entire life in the smallest moment, the most contained set of sentences. […]
With opening poem and five carved, numbered sections, there is an element of My Heresies of being constructed as a long sentence, a book-length suite of poems seamlessly stitched into a single, ongoing conversational thread. The poems are propelled by hush and halt, a tempo of thoughtful measure, articulation, excavation and archaeological play, but one that loops and reels and revels in repetition, managing to find new elements across familiar stories, familiar lines and phrases. “Failure to absorb the verb / and modify the actor accordingly.” begins the poem “Indictment for Failure to Conjugate,” “To sit and / play dumb.” There is also an interesting thread contained within this collection of the moments and lyrics of the late German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a poet with whom Stefanescu feels both cultural and poetic affinity. “Paul Celan begins with an act of self-naming.” begins the poem “Sonnet at the Ghost Commune,” “The poem claims the invention of self / on a Bucharest windowsill. Poets put // the moon in its place / at the horn of the table / on the shoe of the satyr folding laundry into bohemian ballet.”
There is such a detailed intimacy to this collection, and a sharp and open intelligence at play, one that invites the reader in as an equal, unafraid of what these lines might reveal.
rob mclennan, Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies
The second section of Thomas Meyer’s Fisher King, ‘Adages Agenda’ begins with these words:
Have I said more than I meant. Or mean to? I mean have I said too much, shy of either revelation or burden. Not so much said as wrote. Letter. Poem.
It’s a significant question for a writer who’s launching into a book a significant part of which consists of the relation of memories of personal relationships from teen romances through his 40-year-long partnership with Jonathan Williams to his current marriage to Michael Watt. It also bears on the idea that people as written have their own reality as compared to their ‘real’ one, as in this poem, poem ‘x’ from the short first section, which shares the book’s title:
I am Merlin.
I only exist in books.An empty place.
For us, as readers, Meyer’s cast of characters also exist in the empty space of the book but are none the less as real as Merlin; ‘memoirs are inventions, fictions autobiography’. […]
Much earlier in the book, thinking of Bunting and Pound’s ‘Dichten = Condensare’, Meyer writes:
Could it be that an aesthetic invented at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to the nineteenth might lack application at the beginning of the twenty-first? We don’t need to compress, we need to expand. Slow poetry? Take time, make time?
It strikes me that in these closing pages, Meyer achieves a kind of slow poetry, a poetry with time and room to think, without succumbing to prolixity:
Something about a peony.
Full blown on the table in a jar.
The whole room filledwith that pink light
coming fromit having us in mind.
Fisher King is a book to inhabit, to move around in, slowly. Inevitably in a review of this nature, I’ve only skated over a few of its surfaces. As a reader, I’ll be back for more.
Billy Mills, Recent Reading May 2025: A Review
There’s no getting around the fact that everyone’s future involves some form of disability. As we age, our bodies show the results of living, i.e., aches, stretch marks, and memory lapses, to name just a few. Poets, it appears, intuit this reality more readily than others, even embrace it. As Loveday puts it, poets, “though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us.” As I read those lines, I thought of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which includes these familiar lines:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Poised between kindness and sorrow, poetry beckons us towards what Loveday calls “connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.” How often have you read a poem and felt a deep gratitude, something far beyond the words on the page? This is poetry’s gift. It delves into our shared humanity, reminding us that the world of poems includes all of us. “What poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible.”
The article goes on to connect poetry and disability: “Contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability…Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time.” You could say that poetry takes a stand against ableism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “prejudice and discrimination aimed at disabled people, often with a patronizing desire to ‘cure’ their disability and make them ‘normal.’”
But is, as the title asserts, poetry disabled? Or is it “differently-abled,” a term sometimes used as a kinder-sounding alternative? I don’t have the answers to those questions. What I do know is that this article made me think hard about my assumptions regarding both poetry and disability.
Eric Goss, “Is poetry disabled?”
“Put it down
on the page” – a writing
teacher says,
“…metaphorically speaking”Meaning the page pales,
letters on paper have been eaten
and digested (as metaphors do),
transmuted into light and hovering figuresOn a backlit screen, the page
a wink in language, a vestige
holding its head aloft in a
restless, churning language.Jill Pearlman, The Page, the Page!
Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.
I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.
I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.
Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.
I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heatwriting a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s motherAnd in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highwayRen Powell, A Score of Sorrows
In early spring a book arrived that I had been eagerly anticipating. Atomic Masquerade by Clara Etherin did not disappoint. Witty, exuberant, layered and innovative, this visual poetry collection is full of delights, from brooding palimpsest portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein to the vivid pair of asemic sonnets “Heaven & Hell” – written in collaboration with AI – with which the book concludes.
Each piece has a distinctive energy, generating an impression of rising out of the page into some intangible third dimension. […]
I have read and reread Atomic Masquerade with great enjoyment; but the enjoyment has been bittersweet, for the book represents the final publication from Penteract Press.
Founded by Anthony Etherin in 2016, Penteract Press has been a leading independent publisher of innovative constrained and visual poetry for almost a decade. The press has given a platform not only to established avant-garde and experimental writers but also to new, previously unknown voices (my own among them). You can read my interview with Anthony about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close here.
Penteract Press books are unique: often sumptuous, always elegant, and characterised by verbal and visual delights and surprises. Moreover, like all good books their intrinsic value to the reader extends beyond the simple pleasure of reading. Diving into a Penteract book is an adventure, an exploration into the art and craft of poetry, an opportunity to investigate the possibilities of language and the space in which letter, word and image coexist.
I have learnt so much from Penteract poets. Luke Bradford’s lyrical Zoolalia, for example, has taught me the beauty of lipograms and how we can tune in to their potential for music and rhythm and energy. The magic of palindromes is revealed through Merlina Acevedo’s Mirrors. Visualising the formal structures in Shakespeare’s sonnets with BardCode by Gregory Betts has suggested new and interesting ways in which I might use rhyme and metrical patterns in my own work.
Marian Christie, A Paean to Penteract Press
I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World.
Han VanderHart, Finding Shape in the Dark (on writing difficult narratives) – Two Online, Generative Writing Workshops, July 5 & 19
One of the things I’m looking forward to exploring in my upcoming workshop Rumination as Route is a practice I call ruminative reading: a way of engaging with texts that invites lingering, layering, and the kind of close attention that reveals deeper textures over time.
I’ll be sharing how I approach reading as a writer, and how I tease out unexpected meaning through methods that mirror the digressive and associative structures I write in. This kind of reading isn’t about decoding a text once and for all, it’s about returning to it, turning it over, letting it shift in your hands and your memory.
My ideas around ruminative reading were shaped by my time writing creative reviews for The Bind, a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Though currently on hiatus, The Bind remains a rich and inspiring archive, a space where reviews take many forms: lesson plans, maps, quizzes, writing prompts. It honors writing at important intersections, and I encourage you to spend time on the site if you haven’t already.
José Angel Araguz, on ruminative reading
Daily I am perplexed by, well, the day, what is transpiring, what has happened in the world since I last checked, what the day will bring and how I’m supposed to respond, what I want and what I have and how to reconcile the differences and align the two, who I am, who I was, what I’ll be, how I’ll manage, what it all means, when I know meaning is a made thing. There are other questions. How do birds fly in the rain? Don’t they feel the pelt of drops like bullets on their backs? The rabbits in the backyard are racing around and leaping over each other in play. Does everything play? Are bacteria on my skin doing their own version of Miss Mary Mack with their flagella? There is so much we don’t know.
I used to be a strict believer in the black-and-whiteness of things. With age I’ve settled into a certain comfort with the gray scale. Nevertheless I’m often an impatient reader of poetry that does not show itself to me right away. I won’t name names at the moment. Too much gray and I’m just wandering in the fog, and really, I’d rather not. This little poem, however, has pleased me over some weeks as I’ve turned it over and over in my mind’s hands like a pretty rock.
Marilyn McCabe, a moment
i ask my friends,
“how have you been keeping yourself
together?” i do not actually want
advice but i want to hear if/how
we are surviving. i look up designs
for a plague doctor uniform.
needle in my teeth, i get to work.
sew together old jackets.
i stop sleeping. sleep is for a different time
with less fire & less windows.Robin Gow, plague doctor
I struggle for language in a murky space. Must I write an ode to this insistent despair? Be thankful for its amorphous presence, its angled ambiguity, its sightless eyes that berate me in silence? The music obfuscates the light. Separates word from meaning. What is the edge of gratitude? What birds listen in the trees beyond it?
talk to me
broken moon:
dark side to dark sideThere is the crescendo. Then the quiet. Then the flapping of wings. Then the jacarandas straightening. Then the echo. Then the hum. The tune running in my head.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Purple song