New Haven, August 8, 2017

February 17, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I lack the libido to write city poems,
writes Cam, and I

now lack the city
and its popular synecdoches:

straphangers, manholes
grids and bridges.

I despise Whitman
and Brooklyn, and gatherings

of euphonic youngthings
about whose oratorios

he and I would then
dash to pieces

our two heads, ambulatory
and intransitive,

standing on the pier
in the freezing cold

on Halloween
every night of the year,

the city a ship or a crazy castle
across this or that river, dark

moving line we mark
with pleasure

objecting indirectly
and hardly holding hands.

by Mia Kang

Listen to Mia read the poem here (scroll to the link towards the bottom of the page).

The Poetry Centre is excited to share with you the final selection from our newest pamphlets – a poem from City Poems by Mia Kang, just published by ignitionpress. Alongside Mia’s pamphlet we are also very pleased to be publishing Hush by Majella Kelly and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed, whose work we featured in previous Weekly Poems.

We will be launching all three pamphlets this week! Join us at the Poetry Café in London on Thursday (20 February) and at Waterstones in Oxford on Friday (21 February). We’ll also be appearing at the Poetry Book Fair on Saturday 22 February (with a reading by Alycia Pirmohamed and fellow ignitionpress poet Joanna Ingham). Register for free tickets for the launches here and buy the new pamphlets here.

We have also just released the latest episode of our Poetry Centre Podcast which features Oxford-based poet Mariah Whelan, whose novel in sonnets, the love i do to you, was recently published by Eyewear Publishing. Listen to Mariah talk about the book here or subscribe to our podcast via iTunes or other podcast providers.

Mia Kang writes poems and other perversions. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America.

A Brooklyn Poets Fellow and runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, she is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ 2016 Catalina Páez and Seumas MacManus Award, among others. Mia is a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where she studies the contested rise of multiculturalism and its failures. Find out more about Mia’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press from Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets, and established poets working on interim or special projects.

The first eight pamphlets to be published by ignitionpress, featuring work by Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, Patrick James Errington, Natalie Whittaker, Belinda Zhawi, Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, and Sarah Shapiro are available from our online Shop. Each pamphlet costs £5 and you can buy three for £12. You can find out more about the poets and their work on our dedicated page.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Endearments

February 11, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I have itemized
your oak leaf long limb wild

& have begun to name you things like
“summer eclipse

in my offline calendar” or even “sleeping
under the stars

in a Wal-Mart parking lot”
& honestly

that kind of romance is okay with me
because secretly I have also named you “river of pine”

& “blossoming spring flower along the path to
Mount Yamnuska.”

There is also my skin and yours,
there is also the way skin & skin are two

vastly different things
that this language has difficulty

capturing:
“every constellated mole” &

“pillar of shade.”
How all of these names describe the way

we coexist
& exist within one another—

the way you disappear into the trees
& I follow.

by Alycia Pirmohamed

Listen to Alycia read the poem here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

The Poetry Centre is excited to share with you the second selection from our forthcoming pamphlets – a poem from Alycia Pirmohamed’s new pamphlet Hinge, published this month by ignitionpress. Alongside Alycia’s pamphlet we are also delighted to publish Mia Kang’s City Poems and Hush by Majella Kelly, whose work we featured in the previous Weekly Poem. We will be sharing a poem from Mia’s pamphlet next week before we launch all three pamphlets at the Poetry Café in London on 20 February and at Waterstones in Oxford on 21 February. We’ll also be appearing at the Poetry Book Fair on 22 February (with a reading by Alycia and fellow ignitionpress poet Joanna Ingham), so do join us on one of these dates! You can find more details about tickets for the launches here.

‘Endearments’ is copyright © Alycia Pirmohamed, 2020. It is reprinted from Hinge (ignitionpress, 2020) by permission of ignitionpress. The poem was first published in the April 2018 issue of Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet currently living in Scotland. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying figurative homelands in poetry written by second-generation immigrant writers of South Asian descent. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. In 2018, Alycia’s chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind was selected by Camille Rankine for the BOAAT Press Chapbook Prize. Her other awards include the 92/Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest in Poetry, the Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholars program, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications internationally, including The Paris Review Daily, Prairie Schooner, Best Canadian Poetry, Gutter Magazine, and The London Magazine, among others. Alycia is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets, co-founder of The Scottish BAME Writers Network, and a submission reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She has received support from The Royal Society of Literature, and from Calgary Arts Development via The City of Calgary. Find out more about Alycia’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Hymn

February 3, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It’s Sunday morning and you are moving
inside me like a song that begins
in the syrinx of a lark, invisible
to the eye, silky and golden
on the ear. No promises have I made
yet I thee worship with my body. Me,
a sinner, unwelcome to receive the body
of Christ. I breathe you in as the curtains
of our church fall open on a Pink Lady
sky and the Owenriff river rushes past
the window, breathless and unrepentant
for its winter swell. My hymn hovers
—oh god oh god oh god—then rises again
to beat its milk-warm wings against the glass.

by Majella Kelly

Listen to Majella read the poem here.

The Poetry Centre is excited to share with you a poem from Majella Kelly’s new pamphlet Hush, published this month by our ignitionpress. Alongside Majella’s pamphlet we are also proud to publish Mia Kang’s City Poems and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed. We will be sharing poems from these two pamphlets over the next fortnight before we launch all three pamphlets at the Poetry Café in London on 20 February and at Waterstones in Oxford on 21 February. We’ll also be appearing at the Poetry Book Fair on 22 February, so do join us on one of these dates! You can find more details about tickets here.

Before that, the Poetry Centre is involved in two events this week as part of Oxford Brookes’s Think Human Festival. On Tuesday evening at the Old Fire Station we’ll be showcasing some of the poetry produced through our military veterans’ poetry workshops and reflecting on what it means to be a veteran. It will feature contributions from poet and veteran Jo Young, Dr Jane Potter (an expert on the writing of the First World War), psychologist Dr Rita Phillips, who has researched public perceptions of veterans in the UK and US, and poet Susie Campbell, who led the creative elements of the workshops. Tickets are free but register here.

Then on Thursday evening we’ll be taking part in ‘Poetry and Constitutions’ as we consider what effect constitutional laws and changes have on creativity and national identity. We’ll be welcoming Welsh poet Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, former Manx Bard Stacey Astill, and Scots Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher along with academics Professor Peter Edge and Dr Catriona Mackie. Join us at the Friends’ Meeting House by reserving your place here.

Majella Kelly is an Irish writer from Tuam, Co. Galway. In 2019 she won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. She was shortlisted for the Rialto Pamphlet Competition and the Listowel Poetry Collection Award. She was also shortlisted for the inaugural Brotherton Prize at Leeds University and her poems will be published by Carcanet in a Brotherton anthology alongside the winner and the other three shortlisted poets.

In 2018 she won the Ambit Poetry Prize, came second in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted by The Irish Times for a Hennessy Literary Award. In 2017 she was nominated by Crannóg for a Pushcart Prize and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. In 2016 she came third in the Resurgence Eco Poetry Prize (now the Ginkgo Prize). Her poetry and short fiction has been published in such places as The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, Ambit, The Well Review, Cyphers, The Pickled Body, Quarryman, Best New British & Irish Poets 2017, and Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Annual 2017 & 2018. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.