STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
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Hell’s kitchen workers
ALISTAIR FINDLAY introduces the work of the four women poets whose work will feature on our pages this month
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
CHOOSING poems for the weekly Thursday Poem slot and monthly review hinges on what arrives via email, new collections, gleanings from leftist culture magazines and broad left anthologies.
My previous reviews and selections for April and July both featured single collections by men, but this month it’s all women poets, varying in age, style, publishing history and topic and who collectively contradict the kind of stereotypes that once confined women’s writing to “ecriture feminine,” taken apart in Elma Mitchell’s 1967 poem Thoughts After Ruskin, and available online:
Women reminded him of lilies and rosies,/ Me they remind rather of blood and soap,/ Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,/ Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:// Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,/ Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,/ Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,/ Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverizing,/ - All the terrible chemistry of their kitchen.
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ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin