SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
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21st Century Poetry with ANDY CROFT
New titles from Fran Lock, Richard Skinner, Tara Bergin and Mark A Murphy
Good Cop vs Bad Fascist fantasy, a guilty witness, Scottish witchcraft, and Camino de Santiago shocker
Releases from Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Maggie Nicols/Robert Mitchell/Alya Al Sultani, and Gordon Beck Trio and Quintet
The Bard stands with the Reformers of Peterloo, and their shared genius in teaching history with music and song
SUE TURNER is fascinated by a book that researches who the largely immigrant workforce were that built the Empire State
MARIA DUARTE and MALC McGOOKIN review Sirat, The Testament of Ann Lee, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, and All You Need Is Kill
AFTER all those appalling, fawning poems about the monarchy (leaving some writers who should have known better looking rather foolish), it is a relief to come across Fran Lock’s Sid James at the Poetry Society:
“Cor blimey! If you’re wearing those clothes for a bet, you’ve won…Your poetry is / for rent collectors rubbing their hands at your / sorry arrears … If you’re writing that shit for a bet, / you’ve won.”
Fran Lock’s new collection Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, Ireland, €15) is her biggest and best collection yet, a series of vivid monologues and harangues by marginal voices, loners, outsiders and outcasts, surreal and subversive.
Similar stories
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
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
PATRICK JONES recommends a vital anthology from Afghan and Iranian poets where the political and personal fuse into witness-bearing and manifesto-making
A pamphlet by British Latinx poet Patrick Romero McCafferty, poetry by Anglo-Argentinian Miguel Cullen, and a book of conjuring poems by Mexican Pedro Serrano