2004

November 23, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I hadn’t heard of Section 28 and how it was repealed
in November 2003 in England and Wales but I knew
that taking out the library’s only copy of Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit would be difficult, so I tried to read
as much of the book as I could behind Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets till the librarian asked what I was
reading and said do your parents know, which made me
turn the colour of my school tie. The librarian smiled like
people do in films before the scene changes to a moody shot
of the protagonist by the sea on a stormy day contemplating
whether to swim in the tidal pool full of seaweed with no life-
guard on duty and said you’re reading a book from the Adult
Section, at which point the babies who were normally crying
stopped and I thought about the Childline poster at school
which now had the word GAY graffitied across the boy on
the phone looking sort of sad with the number 0800 1111
printed in one of those typefaces that tried too hard to be
popular with teenagers and I thought about everything I’d
say if I called up but as the librarian asked me again to put
Oranges back on the shelf even Childline didn’t comfort me
much as I realised the counsellor could be someone like her

by Jo Morris Dixon

News from the Poetry Centre: we recently announced the winners of our International Poetry Competition, judged by Will Harris. You can find out who won and who was shortlisted in the EAL and Open categories on our website, where you can also register to attend our online awards event on 7 December. Everyone is welcome to attend! You’ll be able to hear from the winners in both categories and also from the judge, Will Harris, who will talk about judging the competition and give a short reading from his work.

This week’s poet, Jo Morris Dixon, will be launching her pamphlet online this evening (Tuesday) at 7.30pm alongside other Verve poets who will also be sharing new work: Zoe Brigley, Phoebe Stuckes, and Golnoosh Nour. You can sign up to attend for free. Just visit this page for the Zoom details.

Jo Morris Dixon’s debut pamphlet I told you everything reveals how poetry can function as a holding place for difficult experiences and emotions. Through language at once vivid and straightforward, Dixon skilfully addresses coming-of-age themes which are often left unexplored, even in therapy rooms. There is a keen attentiveness to form in these startling poems, ranging from the sonnet to the Golden Shovel. Urgent, complex and searingly honest, I told you everything is a fierce addition to poetry and queer writing in the UK. You can read more about it and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Jo Morris Dixon grew up in Birmingham and now lives in London. She has worked in museums and currently works for a mental health charity. Her poetry has been published in Oxford Poetry and The Poetry Review. She was longlisted for the 2015 Plough Poetry Prize and the 2020 National Poetry Competition.  I told you everything is her debut pamphlet. Read more about Jo’s work on her website.

Winner of both the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher and the Michael Marks Publisher’s Award, Verve Poetry Press is a Birmingham-based publisher. It is dedicated to promoting and showcasing Birmingham and UK poetic talent in colourful and exciting ways – as you would expect from a press that has grown out of the giddy and flamboyant, annual four days of poetry and spoken word that is Verve Poetry Festival, Birmingham.

Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival and a debut performance poetry series which sees us working with the brightest rising stars on the UK spoken word scene. We also assert our right to publish any poetry we feel needs and deserves to find print wherever we find it. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art.

You can find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website, where you can also sign up to the mailing list. You can follow the press on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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.

Foxes

November 1, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I lie awake at night thinking of all the times I was told
to stay quiet. All the times I should have said nothing.

Listen, I am only a mangy fox among the recycling bins,
screeching to no one, chewing on my own tail. I know

I’m supposed to be checking over my shoulder
for something, but what? I keep expecting

the yellow window light of other people’s houses
to bust open like a yolk and let me in. I keep waiting

to be picked up and held until I stop shaking
but I’m difficult to touch. Even the stars

are absenting themselves to the orange dark.
I sit at home, I lick my wounds. I chose

all of this, my job, this city, I pulled it close,
over and over with my grubby little hands.

by Phoebe Stuckes

Her first pamphlet since her debut full collection Platinum Blonde sees Phoebe Stuckes’ trademark poems of high humour and hubris take on a dreamier, more abstract, quality. Perhaps the ‘wise-cracking party girl’ of her earlier work is sensing that, for a while at least, the party is postponed. There isn’t much worth staying up late for any more in these poems. Instead, our character lies awake in bed long into the night or wakes up into a pre-dawn world they barely recognise. And the strange new rural setting they wake to is inviting and also threatening and therefore not to be trusted. Read more about the pamphlet and buy a copy on the Verve website.

Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset now living in London. She has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet. Her writing has appeared in Poetry Review, The Rialto, The North and Ambit among others. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic was shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award 2017. She has been awarded an Eric Gregory Award and The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her first full length collection, Platinum Blonde, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020. You can find out more about Phoebe on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram (and if you’d like to keep pace with her baking exploits, you can find those here).

You can find out more about Verve Poetry Press on the publisher’s website, where you can also sign up to the mailing list. You can follow the press on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Lines given with a Penwiper

October 25, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I have compassion on the carpeting,
   And on your back I have compassion too.
The splendid Brussels web is suffering
   In the dimmed lustre of each glowing hue;
And you the everlasting altering
   Of your position with strange aches must rue.
Behold, I come the carpet to preserve,
And save your spine from a continual curve.

by Christina Rossett

Listen to the Poetry Centre’s Dr Dinah Roe read and discuss this poem.

This week’s poem by Christina Rossetti marks the beginning of ‘The Fiery Antidote’: our semester-long celebration both of Rossetti and of our colleague Dr Dinah Roe’s research about her and the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art and writing.

We invite you to join us! Our first event is an online discussion group this Thursday (28 October) from 12-12.45pm when we’ll be looking at Rossetti’s poem ‘Shut Out’. You can sign up for the group and find out more about our events via this link. Everyone is very welcome to attend – all you need to do beforehand is read the poem, which you can find here.

Also this week we launch a new Poetry Centre initiative: monthly Instagram poetry prompts! Curated by Poetry Centre Interns Maleeha and Rhiannon, they are designed to spark inspiration. Write a poem in response to one or more of these prompts, which you can find on our Instagram page from 12pm today (Monday), and e-mail them to us (oxfordbrookespoetry@gmail.com) by the end of the week. We’ll select the best and post them on Instagram next week!

‘Lines given with a Penwiper’ was composed on 20 November 1847, when Rossetti was a teenager and caring for her father. It was not published during Rossetti’s lifetime and is in the public domain. You can hear Dinah read the poem and discuss it here.

Born in London in 1830, Christina Rossetti was one of four children (her siblings included the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Some of her earliest poems were printed privately, but she also published in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. (You can find out more about the Pre-Raphaelites in Dinah’s essay on the British Library website and hear her discuss them in this video about a recent Ashmolean Museum exhibition.)

One of Rossetti’s most famous poems is ‘Goblin Market’, a long fairy tale-like piece that was first published in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, the collection which made her name (despite critiques from figures like John Ruskin, who called the poet’s ‘irregular measures’ a ‘calamity of modern poetry’). You can read a commentary about ‘Goblin Market’ by Dinah on the British Library website.

Often inspired by her Christian faith, Rossetti’s subsequent work (in collections such as A Pageant and Other Poems and Verses) established her as a leading Victorian poet and also a poet for children (Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book).

After her death from cancer in 1894, her brother William Michael Rossetti collected many of her poems in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti in 1904, but her complete poems were not published until Rebecca Crump published The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Louisiana State University Press, 1979-1990). Dinah is currently editing a new three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Longman Annotated English Poets), due for publication in 2025.

Find out more about Dinah’s research on ‘The Fiery Antidote’ page.

Of the shortest day

October 4, 2021March 2, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni ~ Leave a comment

What has survived is the belief
that water tastes best today;
the moon offers help through the dark.

What has survived is the memory,
pullut-rice rolled between palms,
ballcakes in pandan-ginger syrup.

What has survived is the custom,
serving girls even pairs,
adding strength to their futures.

What has survived is the altar,
table lit by red candles,
joss paper burning in the iron pot.

What has survived is together
tasted on the tongue
as ancestors’ faces fade in frames.

by L. Kiew

This week we feature the last of three poems by poets who have appeared in the exciting online festival Poetics of Home – a Chinese Diaspora Poetry Festival which concludes tomorrow (5 October). The festival is co-ordinated by our Brookes colleague Dr Jennifer Wong, and is designed to connect and showcase the diverse works by established and emerging Anglophone poets writing across the Chinese diaspora. The final event, entitled ‘Women Who Write’, features Belle Ling, Tammy Ho, Cynthia Miller, and the Poetry Centre’s own Claire Cox. It is moderated by Jennifer Wong and takes place tomorrow (Tuesday 5 October), from 1-3pm BST. Although tickets are no longer available via Eventbrite, you can contact the organisers for more details of the Zoom link by visiting the Poetics of Home site.The festival is presented in collaboration with Wasafiri and the Institute of English Studies, with the support of the Lottery Fund from Arts Council England. For more details about the festival and to sign up for the events, visit the festival website.

‘Of the shortest day’ is copyright © L. Kiew, 2021. The poem first appeared in The Rialto, issue 95.L. Kiew is a Chinese-Malaysian living in London. She earns her living as an accountant. She holds a MSc in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Edinburgh University. In 2017, L. Kiew took part in the Poetry School/London Parks and Gardens Trusts Mixed Borders Poets Residency Scheme and the Toast Poetry mentoring programme. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Primers mentoring and publication scheme and was a 2019/20 participant in the London Library Emerging Writers Programme.Her poems have been published in Butcher’s Dog, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse, Obsessed with Pipework, Tears in the Fence, The Scores and The North among other magazines and websites.L. Kiew’s collaboration with Michael Weston is included in Battalion, available from Sidekick Books. Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books in 2019. Find out more about L. Kiew’s work from her website and follow her on Twitter.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.

Beginner’s Wall, Shek O

September 28, 2021March 2, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni ~ Leave a comment

Big waves lick boulders above the sea level.
            A typhoon brought salt, now dusty,
over volcanic cliffs, where we sit.
            We pick up small pieces of graphite,
trailing our spot to prove their colouration.
            I lie like seaweed drying for consumption,
arms stretched next to my ears, and stare
            at the sky wide open, seamless with the sea,
a gradient of indigo and turquoise where
            ribbons of sand and foam intersperse.
If you look hard enough, waves from afar
            carry incessant gouges like woodcut.

A challenge I can’t take without liquid courage:
            rock-climbers set ropes, fix harnesses
and check helmets for each other, trusting
            their weight with muscle strength and grip.
Giving in to gravity, too, is sometimes crucial.
            Let hips sink onto an invisible chair mid-air
for rest. The hard part is to know you won’t fall.
            Tension! Tension! Climbers’ partners
on the ground look up for commands. The language
            one must learn facing speechless crags.
The wind growls, uncritical to recent histories
            of survival out of besieged brick walls.

by Cheng Tim Tim

This week we feature the second of three poems by poets appearing in the exciting new online festival Poetics of Home – a Chinese Diaspora Poetry Festival that is currently underway and continues until 5 October. The festival is co-ordinated by our Brookes colleague Dr Jennifer Wong, and is designed to connect and showcase the diverse works by established and emerging Anglophone poets writing across the Chinese diaspora. It features a wonderfully rich line-up of speakers from all over the world, such as Marilyn Chin, Mary Jean Chan, Susheila Nasta, Hannah Lowe, and Will Harris, who will be taking part in poetry readings and discussions on a range of urgent themes. The festival is presented in collaboration with Wasafiri and the Institute of English Studies, with the support of the Lottery Fund from Arts Council England. For more details about the festival and to sign up for the events, visit the festival website.

Cheng Tim Tim is a poet, teacher and music enthusiast from Hong Kong, currently reading for an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems have found homes in Berfrois, diode, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She was nominated for Best Small Fiction by SAND Journal in 2020. She is one of the co-founding editors of EDGE: HKBU Creative Journal. She is working on chapbooks which explore Hong Kong’s natural, urban and emotional landscapes, as well as desire and rituals through the lens of tattooing. She loves artworks that heal and provoke. Follow Cheng Tim Tim on Twitter.

Cheng Tim Tim will be reading at the Poetry and Society event today (Tuesday 28 September) at 1pm, and you can join via Zoom at this link. The event also features Laura Jane Lee, Natalie Linh Bolderston, and Sarah Howe.

Later today at 6pm, Poetics of Home presents Cultural Hybridity: Will Harris, Jay G Ying, and Helen Bowell in conversation with Lucienne Loh (co-hosted with the British Chinese Studies Network). Find more details on the Eventbrite page.

Work song of Foxconn

September 21, 2021March 2, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni ~ Leave a comment

by Jinhao Xie

This week we feature the first of three poems by poets appearing in the exciting new online festival Poetics of Home – a Chinese Diaspora Poetry Festival. Poetics of Home begins tomorrow (Wednesday 22 September) and continues until 6 October. The festival is co-ordinated by our Brookes colleague Dr Jennifer Wong, and is designed to connect and showcase the diverse works by established and emerging Anglophone poets writing across the Chinese diaspora. It features a wonderfully rich line-up of speakers from all over the world, such as Marilyn Chin, Mary Jean Chan, Susheila Nasta, Hannah Lowe, and Will Harris, who will be taking part in poetry readings and discussions on a range of urgent themes. The festival is presented in collaboration with Wasafiri and the Institute of English Studies, with the generous support of the Lottery Fund from Arts Council England. For more details about the festival and to sign up for the events, visit the festival website.

‘Work song of Foxconn’ is copyright © Jinhao Xie, 2021 and reproduced by permission of the author.Jinhao Xie is a poet born in Chengdu. Their poetry touches on themes of culture, self-hood and the everyday. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Gutter Magazine, harana poetry, bath magg, Spilled Milk Magazine, and their poems anthologised in Slam! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This, edited by Nikita Gill, and their visual poems are included in Instagram Poems for Every Day by the National Poetry Library.You can follow Jinhao Xie on Twitter and Instagram.Jinhao will be reading at the ‘Mapping of Desire’ event moderated by Annie Fan in the Poetics of Home festival on Sunday 3 October at 12 noon (UK time), along with Nicholas Wong and Lady Red Ego. For details and to sign up to attend, visit the Eventbrite 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.

two perspectives on a landscape

September 17, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Now you find yourself in the country,
in the same country where you were born.

Tooth-first, you, a knobbled branch, your hand.
You want reasons for the engine. There are none.

But how it rusts, thinking, listless in the grass,
while you have a mouth of blood and wind.

Spit out the trees, each one you’ve planted,
with nobody else around. Now they stand

on hillsides that always meant a window,
though it slanted slightly in its frame.

Though now you wonder of the window’s
high, neglected corners, you cannot run to –

now you realise you have found yourself
in a landscape you no longer understand.

There are new things you can understand
in the old way.

There are old things you can understand
in a new way.

You sometimes think of you as the où
without location,

carrying yourself, your own bouquet, to bed-
rooms and searching
for a place to put it down.

You sometimes think about the old,
frittering away, unread
books lining their shelves:

an apartment, a bedroom like your own
palm, fingering the curtains.

You sometimes think about the old ways,
the old things –

in the garage
of what you think,
the new things are all
hopeless.

by Joshua Calladine-Jones

Our annual competition is closing soon! The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, judged by Will Harris, closes for entries this Monday (20 September) at 23.00 BST/22.00 GMT. There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. This year, thanks to the generosity of poet Isy Mead, we also have a limited number of free entries available for BAME poets who have been state-educated in the UK. You can find out more about the competition on our website.

‘two perspectives on a landscape’ is copyright © Joshua Calladine-Jones, 2021. It is reprinted from Constructions [Konstrukce] (tall-lighthouse, 2021) by permission of tall-lighthouse. You can read more about the pamphlet on the tall-lighthouse website.

The poems in this sometimes surreal and experimental pamphlet were influenced by the conditions of the pandemic, with its renewed focus on video-conferencing and other forms of digital technology. Konstrukce is a Czech word, meaning construction and the poetry is assembled from fragments, sentences noted down during online conversations with speakers who use English as a second-hand language, replete with faults, slips, and narratives both intentional and accidental. There are distortions, too, in the sequences, where the poet uses a technique of retranslation to revise literary form, using his own poetic discipline to create a justly memorable pamphlet.

You can find out more about the pamphlet and listen to Joshua read poems from it on the tall-lighthouse website, where you can also buy a copy.

tall-lighthouse has a reputation for publishing exciting new poetry, being the first to publish Sarah Howe, Helen Mort, Liz Berry, Jay Bernard, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Emily Berry and many others. Learn more about the press on the tall-lighthouse website and follow tall-lighthouse on Facebook and Twitter.

The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance

August 23, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Don’t think of me as lime-robed and lost
in undailiness; I come with sleeves rolled-up,
worker in a mire of substance. Yes, I stink!

I chew on a rotted wafer of dried fish glue
my saliva in the mix. How else to stretch the hue
of some frosty cleric? My paints are part kill:

rabbit skin, horse hoof, pig’s blood.
I knife, mine, grind, churn, pound, steep, sweat
my way to that primal blue you worship.

When you varnish me with meaning, remember
the grit under my nails, the fumes. Green
comes from the labour camps you made

for your longing. And that hair-coiled girl
resolved from light. She’s no touched-up
pink fix. She took on the earth

to coagulate: egg-yolk, red clay, mineral, old linen
marble dust. Do you think, if she looked up
she wouldn’t roar with the energy of her roots?

by Rosalind Hudis

News from the Poetry Centre: our new ignitionpress pamphlets by Fathima Zahra, Zein Sa’dedin and Katie Byford are now available to buy! Join us this Wednesday 25 August as we launch them in an online event at 7pm BST. It’s free to attend, but you’ll need to sign up (via Zoom) in advance.

Our International Poetry Competition, judged this year by Will Harris, closes in a month! There are two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language, and the winner of each category receives £1000. For more information and to enter, visit our website.

‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’ is copyright © Rosalind Hudis, 2021, and is reprinted here from Restorations (Seren, 2021) by permission of Seren. You can read more about the collection and buy a copy on the Seren website.

Notes from Amy Wack, Poetry Editor at Seren:

Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles: we meet a variety of characters including the explorer, Isabella Bird, and the nineteenth century navigator Sarah Jane Rees (Cranogwen) who lived in Llangrannog in Ceredigion. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed. Find out more about the collection and buy a copy on the Seren website.

Rosalind Hudis grew up in Suffolk, but after a nomadic period making a living in different countries, and areas, of Britain, settled in West Wales where she has lived for many years with her partner, the puppeteer Tony Heales, and her family. A person of very mixed ethnic background, with roots as far apart as Moldova and Senegal, she finds Wales to be the place that is home. A onetime musician, she has also written from an early age, and now works as a freelance writer, editor, reviewer and tutor. She has taught creative writing at the University of Wales Trinity St David’s Lampeter, and offers writing workshops and readings to community groups or events. She sits on the editorial board of The Lampeter Review.

Besides appearing widely in journals, Rosalind has published a pamphlet with Rack Press, Terra Ignota (2013) and a full collection, Tilt, with Cinnamon Press (2014), poetry from which was highly commended in the 2015 Forward prizes. She has won awards in various competitions, including the National Poetry Competition. Rosalind is a Hawthornden Fellow (2017) and the recipient of a Literature Wales Writers bursary in 2013 and 2018. Read more about Rosalind’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Seren is Wales’ leading independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales. With a list spanning poetry, fiction and non-fiction, many of our books are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across the UK and America. Our aim is not simply to reflect what is going on in the culture in which we publish, but to drive that culture forward, to engage with the world, and to bring Welsh literature, art and politics before a wider audience. At the heart of our list is a beautiful poem, a good story told well or an idea or history presented interestingly or provocatively. We’re international in authorship and readership, though our roots remain here in Wales, where we prove that writers from a small country with an intricate culture have a worldwide relevance.

Since its beginnings in 1981, Seren has developed into one of the most interesting publishing houses in Britain. Based in Bridgend, Seren continues to nurture and publish new talent whose quality is recognised around the world. This year we celebrate our 40^th anniversary. We’ve had a whole series of online events readings and launches since the start of the Pandemic lockdowns and hope to return to live events in the coming months. We also publish Poetry Wales Magazine and we present the yearly Cardiff Poetry Festival featuring readers from all over the world. Our Managing Editor is Mick Felton, longtime Sales and Publicity Officer is Simon Hicks, Sarah Johnson is our Marketing Officer and Jamie Hill is in Design and Production. Jannat Ahmed is Poetry Wales’ administrative assistant. Find out more by visiting Seren’s website.

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.

London Aquatics Centre, Stratford

August 16, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The first time you wear a bikini
in public, it’s ladies’ hour at the local
pool — your mother’s disapproving
brows follow you. The changing
room is filled with the ghosts of
middle school girls’ staccato laughter.
Your skin winces with no place
to hide. Stand in front of the mirror,
wishing you could be reduced to a sliver
of light. Picture knives caressing your hips,
walk down the hall to a symphony
of rapid Bengali, breathe it all in
and jump. Here, I could be rain
bow fish or electric eel.

by Fathima Zahra

Listen to Fathima Zahra read ‘London Aquatics Centre, Stratford’

This week we’re delighted to feature the final of three poems by new ignitionpress poets Katie Byford, Zein Sa’dedin and Fathima Zahra, all of whom have pamphlets forthcoming from our press. We’re very excited to be launching them (online) on Wednesday 25 August at 7pm BST and hope that you will join us! You can sign up for the Zoom webinar via this link.

Sargam / Swargam evokes a deep sense of precarity in being, belonging and in the very words we choose to mean home. This pamphlet, simultaneously forthright and fragile, touches on themes of girlhood, shame, desire and an uneasy burgeoning into maturity. Through exquisitely-wrought language and precise character observations, these poems capture what it is to grow up in three different locations, illuminating the legacies of that experience. Find out more about the pamphlet on the Poetry Centre website.

Fathima Zahra is an Indian poet based in Essex. She is a Barbican Young Poet and a Roundhouse Poetry Collective alum. She has won the Bridport Prize, the Wells Fest Young Poets Prize and the Asia House Poetry Slam 2019. Her work has been published or are forthcoming in Tentacular Magazine and Khidr Zine; has been anthologised in SLAM! You’re Gonna Wanna Hear This (Pan Macmillan, 2020), A Letter, A Poem, A Home (Red River Press, 2020). She been featured across BBC World News, The New Indian Express and Young Poets Network. Commissions include Poet in the City, Adrian Brinkerhoff Foundation and Bedtime Stories for the End of the World. She has performed at various festivals including Hay, Latitude, VERVE poetry festival, The Last Word and Brainchild. She is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Follow Zahra on Twitter and Instagram and find her on Linktree.

Established by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre in 2017, ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. Pamphlets published by the press have so far received three Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections (for A Hurry of English, Hinge, and Ripe) and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed was also shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award, 2020. Read more about the press on our website.

staircase – جبل اللويبدة jabal alweibdeh

August 9, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the tourists are taking over
the square & i’ve seen it

past the frenchified streetlamps
& wallace fountains

i’ve seen it by mama’s childhood
home near duwar al hawooz

i’ve seen it the window sign
reading ‘شقة للإيجار for expats only’

i’ve lived my life so far an archive
of this city my face my mother’s

mirrored outside its sandstone
walls bas this city holds its people

differently as it always has
it stages its streets like an exercise

in circumstance its gaze
towards whatever else

is west of itself

by Zein Sa’dedin
Listen to Zein Sa’dedin read ‘staircase’

This week we’re delighted to feature the second of three poems by new ignitionpress poets Katie Byford, Zein Sa’dedin and Fathima Zahra, all of whom have pamphlets forthcoming from our press. We’re very excited to be launching them (online) on Wednesday 25 August at 7pm BST and hope that you will join us! You can sign up for the Zoom webinar via this link .

Staircase is an extraordinary debut, exploring landscape, locality and the constructions of a self that inhabits and manoeuvres through many layered textures – mediated by the cultural influences of music and other artistic forms. Those familiar with the neighbourhoods on the seven hills of Amman will recognize the places named, yet all readers will be entranced by them. The Arabic script interwoven through the poems allows the printed word to reflect the literary contours and evocative images contained within this intensely crafted work.

Zein Sa’dedin is a poet, editor, and educator from and currently based in Amman, Jordan. She is the founding editor-in-chief of BAHR // بحر – an online literary and creative platform dedicated to championing writers and artists from Southwest Asia and North Africa in all their languages. Zein holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews and a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She currently teaches English language as well as the occasional writing workshop. Zein is also working to establish a bilingual literary journal from, within, and for SWANA and the Levant. Her poem, ‘the sea is the most flexible of things,’ was the recipient of the 2019 Third Coast Poetry Prize. Zein’s work has appeared in harana poetry, The Shuruq Festival, Zarf Poetry, Third Coast Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Muzzle Magazine, Winter Tangerine, Sukoon Magazine, Jaffat el Aqlam, and others.

You can follow Zein on Twitter and Instagram.

Established by Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre in 2017, ignitionpress is a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. In the future, we plan to work with established poets who are developing interim or special projects. Pamphlets published by the press have so far received three Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice selections (for A Hurry of English, Hinge, and Ripe) and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed was also shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award, 2020. Read more about the press on our website.