LEO BOIX recommends a ravishing, full-bodied drama about the intensely demanding and emotional art of Kabuki theatre
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Radical poetry from Amir Darwish, David Cain, Ross Wilson, Reja-e Busailah and Andy Green
On the day of the election, MARTIN GOLLAN reflects on the perennial relationship between the far-right and the back-hander
MARY CONWAY is gripped by the powerful emotional journeys portrayed by the parents of the perpetrator and victims of a mass shooting
LEO BOIX reviews a novel where shadows deceive and mortality looms, and a poetry collection that refuses to dim
ROBIN STYLES welcomes a boundary pushing work of fiction exploring the life and ideas of the godmother of modernism
PAUL DONOVAN recommends an energetic adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel, that emphasises how psychiatry is a tool in the hands of a racist agenda
AMIR DARWISH is a British-Syrian poet of Kurdish origin who came to this country as an asylum-seeker during the second Gulf war, hanging underneath a lorry on a cross-channel ferry.
In his second full-length collection Dear Refugee, Darwish seeks to rescue refugees from the media images of perpetrators or victims and he reflects on the suffering of the world’s 22 million refugees, what they have left behind, what they have lost and where they have arrived:
“Be thankful to the roads, Their stones as they lie before you/To the sky that generously shows you/The moon dangling its legs in your eyes,/Say thank you to nature, to the rivers who feed/The earth to feed you,/Be thankful to life and earth/When they knock open your heart.”
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JOHN HAWKINS welcomes the passion, grief, precision and elegance of an eloquent witness of genocide