This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY It’s possible to be thrilled and exhilarated at the same time as appalled and frightened – after all, this is the basis on which horror fiction operates. So one thing that’s unsettling about the current moment is the fact that, on one level, people […]
Author archives: shotscarecrow
Firmament, Vol. 2 No. 1
I have three new poems in the latest issue of Firmament, a handsome magazine made by Sublunary Editions, who are a very impressive small press based in Seattle, with editorial input from the UK. I’m especially happy to have these poems published, as all three are from a new collection I’ve been working on for, […]
Detachment / Dishonored 2 / The Beetle
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I was originally planning to write on two topics: whether or not writers need to read, and disconnections at a near distance. After weighing up which to take on first, I found that the two bled in to one another. When I teach poetry […]
Tiny Library / The Sanctuary Sparrow / Toxic Journalism
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. TINY LIBRARY I continue to train between Cambridge, London, Buckinghamshire and sometimes Matlock, picking up post and moving things around as I try to figure out whereabouts in the vicinity of my new job I can settle permanently, meaning in all likelihood for the […]
Settling / Kosuke, Kisuke and Snufkin / Just Joss
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I keep saying and thinking ‘when I’m settled in’. To living in Cambridge, that is. I use these words to defer certain expectations – this or that will happen ‘when I’m settled’. But I’m not sure what that will look or feel like. The opposite […]
Discipline / Sandsnarl on Sale / The 2002 Academy Awards / Lyonesse
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY My resolution this year is to write in a slightly more disciplined, less sporadic manner, and to use the internet to cultivate a space for the things I write – which is to say, I mean to publish more and react less. It’s […]
Teaching Poetry / Village of Eight Graves / Battle of the Sexes
This post can also be read on my Substack, Stray Bulletin. DIARY I’m elbow-deep in preparation for the new teaching semester, trying to work out how much I want to depart from those approaches to poetry teaching I’m familiar with. I’ll also be teaching plays and publishing, but here I’m more content to work within […]
Marble Broadsheet 8: Animals
Marble Poetry, edited by Aisling Tempany, produces both a journal and a broadsheet, as well as a number of pamphlets, all with a distinctive visual style – very impressive for a one-person operation. The theme of broadsheet #8 is animals, and features six poems, including Mandy Beattie’s charming ‘Catticus’, about an “emerald-eyed half-kitten and his […]
The Babel Tower Notice Board
The Babel Tower Notice Board is in its final month of publication. A shame – I’d only discovered it recently. I have an extract from a longer work published there as of yesterday. Lowly Gods is a rejigged update of material I wrote while on secondment in Hong Kong some years ago. It’s a combination […]
THE LIVE ALBUM by Kat Payne Ware
Few collections I’ve read provide – or even attempt – a more satisfying marriage of form and content than THE LIVE ALBUM. Its presiding subject is meat, and in particular meat production and consumption – the queasy horror of flesh being cleaved and compacted, over and over, by rigid, cold machinery. Language, like muscle, is […]