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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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, […]