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 […]
Author archives: shotscarecrow
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 […]
Diagram 21.5
I have some work in the new issue of Diagram, one of my favourite US journals – extracts from two small, in-progress books that are part of the same world as Sandsnarl and Unravelanche. Prose or poetry? Both are in that weird hinterland between – I could never get them published as stories, but they […]
(Good) Poems
This is a quickfire response to ‘(Good) Person Poems’, an op-ed by Rory Waterman published by Poetry London, and I’d like to start by saying that I’m glad this piece was published. It airs a grievance that is clearly deeply felt, and shared by others in the poetry community, and it’s better that such grievances […]
Sweet Mystress
Today is National Poetry Day. I don’t often manage much to coincide with it, but this year the organisers asked me for a poem on the theme of choice for their website, so I have given them Sweet Mystress, a ludokinetic poem with a few puzzles and a secret ending. It’s in pat a homage […]
Resonance FM, Saturday 25th September, 2.30pm
I’m going to be interviewed by Jude Cowan on Resonance FM this Saturday – we’ll be talking about Sandsnarl and poem-game hybrids. Tune in at 2.30pm, 104.4 FM.
Sandsnarl Book Launch
I’ll be launching my new pamphlet, Sandsnarl, next Friday on Zoom, from 7pm, with support readings from Kirsten Irving and Richard Evans, my two oldest poetry squadmates. For now, here’s a brief introduction to the book: Sandsnarl is a settlement steeped in sand – though where it came from and how long ago is a […]
Play Lists by Jessica Mookherjee
At first brush, it’s tempting to classify Play Lists as a document of an era, a window onto another time – the poems are fizzy with teenage love and fashion craze, tentative trespass and intoxication, all set to a pop/glam/alt rock soundtrack that you can access via Spotify. It has bags of atmosphere and a […]
Gramarye Issue 19
I have three poems in the new issue of Gramarye, a journal published by The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. As you can see from the picture above, it’s a very beautifully designed publication. This poem, ‘Frog’, is in part based on the character of the same name from Chrono Trigger, […]
Performance Anxiety, 15th April 2021
I’m reading tonight at 9pm GMT for Performance Anxiety, an online reading series. Follow them on Twitter for more information. The reading will include an extract from my forthcoming pamphlet, Unravelanche.