Undoing

June 16, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I return
to all the places.

Everything I have done
I have also undone,

marriage,
citizenships.

Trying on clothes
nothing fits.

If you don’t belong
to where you’re from,

you can make anywhere
home.

Little viola cenisia
root shallow and fast

on shifting scree.
Hang on.

by Anja Konig

This week we are delighted to showcase poetry from a press that we haven’t featured before: Bad Betty Press. You can find out more about Bad Betty’s work below and on the press’s website.

The Poetry Centre has just launched its International Poetry Competition for 2020! We’re delighted to say that our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson. As always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

The Centre also recently released a new online publication: the e-anthology ‘My teeth don’t chew on shrapnel’: an anthology of poetry by military veterans. This anthology features exciting, moving, and provocative work by US and UK veterans who were participants in workshops held by the Poetry Centre in 2019-20 and also includes writing about veterans (including an essay by WWI expert Jane Potter) and some writing prompts by Susie Campbell for anyone interested in developing their own writing. The anthology is free to download from the Poetry Centre website and we would very much welcome your feedback! E-mail us or fill out the short form on the site.

Anja Konig grew up in the German language and now writes in English. Her pamphlet Advice for an Only Child was shortlisted for the 2015 Michael Marks prize. Her first collection Animal Experiments is out now with Bad Betty Press. You can follow Anja on Twitter. Anja’s new book is being launched virtually on 25 June, and you can sign up to attend here.

Animal Experiments is a book we need now more than ever. In an era of tribalism, it’s rare to encounter a voice so committed to identifying the root of things as they really are, and then laying those findings bare with benign frankness. While the world ends around us daily, these pages offer a macro and micro view, in which we find ourselves both culpable and insignificant, and it is in that paradox that, perhaps, we might be redeemed.

Bad Betty Press is an independent publisher of new poetry, founded in 2017 by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall. We love writing that is bad (in the Foxy Brown sense) and beautiful (‘a Betty’ in 90s slang). We love the strange, raw and risk-taking. We believe strongly in art’s capacity to challenge its own definition, to curve away from the norm, making space for more and varied voices. Find out more about our books here and follow Bad Betty on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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.

On top of the Monte Carlo

June 4, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

in North Miami Beach, almost thirty floors up,
there’s an Orthodox Jew smoking a cigarette and gasping
at the ocean. I do that too sometimes, wondering if

the waves think they can catch up to one another.
I am jogging and dodging feral cats who weren’t here
a few years ago, but dart about like water-less minnows

across this path, and I wonder if this smoking Jew is
from Paris. There are lots of French-speakers down
here and their words swim into my ears soaked

with Yiddish I don’t understand but understand.
And I am a Reform Jew, if that, and I don’t smoke,
but I am running and thinking of Grandpa who smoked

a pipe and how he was Orthodox for a while in NY,
but he never talked to me about that, nor about much
of anything from his past. He spoke German until

he fled the Gestapo on some rickety ship to Brazil
where he learned Portuguese and made it
to the States and learned English and how to be

an American citizen—he did tell me about that.
I speak un peu du Francais, the “pretty” language
Grandpa told me to study instead of the ugly claw

of German, but can’t imagine having to flee my home,
my country, my language for simply being what I was
born to be and I am agnostic and believe God shakes

his head like Grandpa used to while He watches religion
puff and puff and blow too much down. And there was
Bullay’s mayor telling Oma to sell everything for something

or get nothing at all. Either way, she had to leave.
And Oma took everything she could fit in a suitcase
rather than take anything Nazi. And she ended

up in New York and her mom ended in Theresienstadt
or Auschwitz, we’ll never know. And as I double back
past the Monte Carlo I look up to see if the French Jew

is still there, but I can’t even see remnants of smoke
testifying he even existed. Was he there at all?
Was He? And I think of how there are no more

Kahns living in Germany. Puff—some mirrors
and smoke trick—and I wonder what my Grandfather
would or wouldn’t say in between puffs of his pipe,

at what it’s like to be a Jew in Paris or one standing
alone on the roof of a hotel in Miami Beach
as clouds slow-march over waves that billow

and billow towards some kind of safe shore.

by Peter Kahn

The Centre also recently launched the online publication of the e-anthology ‘My teeth don’t chew on shrapnel’: an anthology of poetry by military veterans. This anthology features exciting, moving, and provocative work by US and UK veterans who were participants in workshops held by the Poetry Centre in 2019-20 and also includes writing about veterans and some writing prompts. The anthology is free to download from the Poetry Centre website and we would very much welcome your feedback! E-mail us or fill out the short form on the site.

‘On top of the Monte Carlo’ is copyright © Peter Kahn, 2020. It is reprinted from Little Kings (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book here. Peter will be launching the book virtually with Nine Arches on 24 June at 7.30pm and you can attend by visiting this link.

Peter Kahn’s debut collection Little Kings is an astonishing book of astute and deeply humane poetry, one which seeks to find in both teaching and learning a common ground, and between longing and belonging an equilibrium. Intuitive and wise, Kahn’s poems remain compelling even when exploring those places where there is ‘no vocabulary for what might happen’. Little Kings encompasses stories of the Jewish diaspora and of American life, interweaving narratives of escape and refuge, of yearning and absence. Some of these poems ricochet with the magnitude of loss and violence, with lives interrupted, half-lived, or vanished. Anchoring these poems is their immense grace and lyricism, and Kahn’s great skill in tenderly carrying memory and experience into our shared understanding. Find out more about the book here and listen to Peter read some poems from it here.

Peter Kahn is a founding member of the London poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen. He has twice been a commended poet in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition. A co-founder of the London Teenage Poetry Slam, Peter also founded the Spoken Word Education Training Programme as a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths University. Now based in Chicago, he holds an MA in English Education from The Ohio State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have published over ninety poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

House, Kept

May 27, 2020April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The oil tank sputters out of time
with the radio rumbling out its soft
jazz provocations, out of sync
with the slo-mo drip in the roof
(which soaks ceiling tiles and
makes them fragile as sandcastles).
The house has been stripped
and deloused like an inmate, but
still the mice leave their turds in
the cookware. It’s been gutted
and prepped for sale, and again,
but who wants to buy a shell,
a mean ghost? Even full of couches
from 1985, it’s empty. The lone
kid who stayed turns the radio
up full blast, smells old Avon
tubes she finds, watches the spot
on the kitchen ceiling as it spreads.

by Sadie McCarney

The Poetry Centre is delighted to announce the online publication of the e-anthology ‘My teeth don’t chew on shrapnel’: an anthology of poetry by military veterans. This anthology features exciting, moving, and provocative work by US and UK veterans who were participants in workshops held by the Poetry Centre in 2019-20. It also includes short essays about veterans in literature and life by Dr Jane Potter and Dr Rita Phillips, an introduction by Dr Niall Munro, and reflections on the workshop by the main facilitator, poet and researcher Susie Campbell. Susie has also provided some excellent writing prompts for anyone interested in working on their own poetry. The anthology is free to download from the Poetry Centre website and we would very much welcome your feedback! E-mail us or fill out the short form on the site.

Live Ones reads like a tomboy with its pockets full of rhinestones, placing them lovingly on the graves of the dead. The poems in Live Ones are intensely honest, photographic in detail yet frequently surreal. This rewarding debut collection grapples with mourning, coming of age, and queer identity against the backdrop of small-town and rural Canada. According to poet Lily Blacksell, it is ‘work scratched with wit, and warmth where you least expect it.’

Find out more about the book and hear Sadie read her sequence ‘Steeltown Songs’ on the tall-lighthouse website.

Sadie McCarney is a Canadian poet who grew up in Nova Scotia. She now lives on Prince Edward Island where she also writes fiction. Her work has been widely published in a variety of publications including Plenitude, Grain, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Room and The Best of The Best Canadian Poetry in English among other places. Read more about her work here and follow Sadie on Twitter.

tall-lighthouse has a strong 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 the press on Facebook and Twitter.

The Truth

April 14, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Long ago, in the Mumbles, my mother wore saris,
all flowing and veiled like the Marys in the giant
picture Bible I’d saved up for. My Father told me
Christ was Krishna – just less colourful. My sister
read philosophy; told me about the aching chasms,
a universe of infinite space between all bodies,
so I hugged her to stop the voice of that truth.

She told me Jesus was no more a God than the tree
outside our house. I loved that oak so agreed
and read the Bible more fervently than ever.
I liked the Bible pictures because everyone
looked dark and foreign like us, with their veils,
beads and saris. I went to chapel in the village,
heard an old man preaching in his Brethren voice.

Their Bibles were small, black with tracing-paper
pages of tiny words and no spaces. They smiled
as I uncovered my Bible for them to see, larger
than myself, full colour, illustrated with mountains,
so I could fall into lands of Palestine, Elam and Judah,
dance through deserts, lament at Jesus’ feet
and sing, yes, he is a tree, he is as warm as wood.

by Jessica Mookherjee

Jessica Mookherjee, highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes, presents her second collection of poems, Tigress. Mixing myth, magic and migration, these poems explore the impact of choice upon our lives and concentrate their magnificent, kaleidoscopic imagination on the intricate and often fraught nature of childhood and family, selfhood and womanhood. You can read more about Jessica’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter and on Instagram.

Fierce, often funny, always charged and revealing, Mookherjee’s acute attention to detail tracks lives lived between Bengal, Wales and London. In exploring the intense displacement and loss that marks the experience of migration, the poems move into territories of danger and safety, illness and heartbreak, and ultimately into self-discovery; a rich and sensual moonlit menagerie of bears, big cats, wolves, and ‘forest mothers’. At every step, Tigress is wildly inventive, elegant and utterly distinctive. Read more about the book here and listen to Jessica read another poem from the collection on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over ninety poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Blood Sugar

April 8, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

No one gave him a scallop-shell or scrip
of anything; he worked long years for this.
He’ll take his As, his hard-earned scholarship,
his knotted hankie full of prejudice,

and seek for truth among the pleasant groves
of academe (Epistles, Horace). Art
hangs in those trees like fruit; like geese in droves,
ideas fill those lanes. His gritstone heart

softens to each blithe spirit there chance-met,
each punting lutenist, each well-read youth,
each fortune-favoured lightfoot lad. And yet:
although all Oxford knows Beauty is Truth

and Truth is Beauty, Sheffield says ‘Not quite.’
Sheffield wonders with Brecht, of what is built
the palace of culture? Such a golden white,
honey on yoghurt, syrup on cream, gilt

tears not worth spilling on milk spilt long ago.
The temple of learning glows like toffee ice.
Or sugar. Raw cane sugar. When you know
t’truth about beauty, then you question t’price.

by Eleanor Brown

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that one of our most recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed, has been selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2020! You can find out more about Alycia’s wonderful pamphlet on our website (scroll down) where you can also hear her read a poem. Although we’re currently unable to post out copies of the pamphlets because of the coronavirus restrictions, any orders made now will be fulfilled as soon as possible.

‘Blood Sugar’ is copyright © Eleanor Brown, 2019. It is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Brown, White Ink Stains (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) www.bloodaxebooks.com. Read more about the book here, where you can also read further sample poems.

Eleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised ‘girlfriend’s revenge’ poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages.

Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children.

A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections. You cana read more about White Ink Stains here, where you can also read further sample poems.

Eleanor Brown was born in 1969 and lived in Scotland until the age of 12. She studied English Literature at York. After graduating she worked variously as a waitress, barmaid, legal secretary, and minutes secretary, to be able to work also as a poet and translator of poetry. In 2001-02 she was Creative Writing Fellow at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. She now lives, works, writes, sings (alto) and dances (Argentine tango) in Sheffield.

Her debut collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She was one of the five poets featured in Bloodaxe’s 1997 New Blood promotion. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, is published by Bloodaxe in October 2019. She has also written works for theatre and led workshops about translating Baudelaire and Gautier in the context of musical settings by Vierne and Berlioz to produce singable versions of the texts. You can read more about Eleanor’s work on her website, find her on Facebook and follow her on Instagram.

The Englishman

April 2, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The Englishman is a regular with a usual.
He has slapped a bar-top laughing.

The Englishman is a charmer and a ladies’ man.
He’s been told off by a barmaid.

Whenever there are ladies present, he says
not when there are ladies present.

We should not be jealous of the Englishman.
He simply had the foresight to buy property.

He barbecues and cooks proper English breakfasts.
He insists on carving any meat.

The Englishman is a breast, and not a leg man.
He prefers the white meat.

On forms, he writes: English, male.
He hesitates between White and Prefer not to say.

He places great significance on handshakes.
He can tell a lot by an Englishman’s handshake.

He shakes hands with children and his brother.
The Englishman kisses ladies on the hand or cheek.

In the bathroom, the Englishman has a cheeky
Punch cartoon, taking aim at the establishment,

and when he pisses, the Englishman aims
for the water, not the bowl. He splashes joyously.

The Englishman is not pissed, actually.
He can handle his drink, and his own affairs.

The Englishman has had an affair. He wears
a signet ring and not a wedding band.

The Englishman doesn’t signal when he changes
lanes on roundabouts or the ring road.

The Englishman is very sorry. He didn’t realise
you were in here, getting changed.

by Ali Lewis

The Poetry Centre is delighted to say that one of our most recent ignitionpress pamphlets, Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed, has been selected as the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Summer 2020! You can find out more about Alycia’s wonderful pamphlet on our website (scroll down) where you can also hear her read a poem. Although we’re currently unable to post out copies of the pamphlets because of the coronavirus restrictions, any orders will be fulfilled as soon as possible.

‘The Englishman’ is copyright © Ali Lewis, 2020. It is reprinted from Hotel (Verve Poetry Press, 2020) by permission of Verve Poetry Press. You can read more about the pamphlet here.

Ali Lewis is a poet from Nottingham. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He has a degree in Politics from Cambridge, where he received the John Dunn and Precious Pearl Prizes and was a member of the Footlights, and an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, where he was shortlisted for the Pat Kavanagh and Ivan Juritz Awards. Ali is an AHRC-funded doctoral student at Durham University and Assistant Editor at Poetry London. You can learn more about Ali and his work on his website and follow him on Twitter.

Blood is washed off a car, the earth is packed away, relationships fracture and mend. Hotel, a striking debut pamphlet from Eric Gregory Award winner Ali Lewis is a book of both close focus and great expansion. We zoom in on a snowflake’s edge and a freckled wrist, and at the same time witness the continents merge and the universe expand into something unknowable. In a collection that contends with the seeming inevitability of masculinity, of grief, and of people moving apart, Hotel shows us that we exist in rooms of similar layouts and puts a glass to the walls between so we might overhear. Find out more about the pamphlet here.

Verve Poetry Press is a fairly new and already award-winning press focussing hard on meeting a need in Birmingham – a need for the vibrant poetry scene here in Brum to find a way to present itself to the poetry world via publication. Co-founded by Stuart Bartholomew and Amerah Saleh, it is publishing poets from all corners of the city – poets that represent the city’s varied and energetic qualities and will communicate its many poetic stories. Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – and a poetry show series which captures the magic of longer poetry performance pieces by poets such as Polarbear and Matt Abbott. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art. Find out more here. In 2019 the press was voted Most Innovative Publisher at the Saboteur Awards and won the Publisher’s Award for Poetry Pamphlets at the Michael Marks Awards.

July 24th

March 26, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Eighty-six years ago today
the Serpentine opened to women
to swim without fear of arrest

I’m lost on the Heath searching
for these ponds, it’s thirty-degrees
in Hampstead, what’s with all the beards?

Two girls in front are talking
about their exes, how they’re okay
now they’re with new men

Don’t tell me fullness is found
from a man, I’ll shoot myself
or dehydrate, a more feasible option

There’s a lot of holding of hands
and leads, my palms are empty
if my mother were here she’d say

Find a good book, easy
for her with a husband and a spaniel
now I’m in the water I relish

The freedom, no one knows I’m here
I could just bob under (not
to get all Virginia Woolf about it)

At lunchtime today we spoke
on the phone, big literary things
are happening for you, how apt

I was sat in Bloomsbury Square
remember Southease, cider
along the Ouse, Monk House

All our Sussex hours? If love
was just lunchtimes of erudite chat
we would have worked completely

But I have this need to swim
with ducks and reeds, you said
it was sweet. It was wild

by Roxy Dunn

Roxy Dunn’s debut pamphlet Clowning, published by Eyewear in 2016, is their highest-selling pamphlet to date and was described by PN Review as ‘quick-fire, appealing, lit by humorous warmth.’ Her poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Orbis and Ofi Press, and a selection of her poems are also printed in the anthology Podium Poets #2, published by Nasty Little Press. She lives in North London and works as an actor and writer. Follow Roxy on Twitter.

Big Sexy Lunch is an irreverent, entertaining account of millennial philosophy and relationships. Roxy Dunn’s observational wit and reflective self-doubt muse on sex, singledom, and falling in and out of love. There’s a directness and an honesty to these poems which humorously scrutinises the conflicts and contradictions of being attached to someone and our ongoing appetite for fulfilment. Read more about the pamphlet and get hold of a copy here.

Added to this is a colourful pamphlet series featuring poets who have previously performed at our sister festival – and a poetry show series which captures the magic of longer poetry performance pieces by poets such as Polarbear and Matt Abbott. Like the festival, we will strive to think about poetry in inclusive ways and embrace the multiplicity of approaches towards this glorious art. Find out more here.

In 2019 the press was voted Most Innovative Publisher at the Saboteur Awards and won the Publisher’s Award for Poetry Pamphlets at the Michael Marks Awards.

Compassion, the life blood of the NHS

March 18, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We are here for you 24/7, in your darkest, most vulnerable and weakest moments.
We are the holding of a hand to show you we are here through it all.
We are people who make porridge at 4am for that eight-year-old boy whose beloved
granddad just died and was in need of distraction.
We are the first people you see when you wake up after surgery and tell you it all went
well.
We are the ears who listen to that 90-year-old lady recite from memory her favourite poem
perfectly because no family comes to visit.
We are the eyes you show your wounds to which we dress without batting an eyelid.
We are the assistants who help you learn to walk again, and who motivate you to try again
after failing.
We are the people who make you a cup of tea after you find out the child you were
carrying will never be born alive.
We are the carers who shave you when you can’t, so you look smart for your wife even in
your hospital bed.
We are the staff who learn to sign their name so they can communicate in a way you
understand.
We are the staff that turn up every day and see so much. In this neverending battle we still
try. A little compassion goes further than you may ever know.
We are the NHS.

by Sarah Quinn

This week we are very pleased to share a poem by a nursing student at Oxford Brookes, Sarah Quinn. At a moment when the National Health Service is being given more attention and under even more pressure than usual, it’s great to be able to hear from someone like Sarah who is able to reflect on the challenges and rewards that come from working in the NHS. We’d like to thank Sarah for sharing the poem and send our grateful thanks also to all health workers for everything they are doing during such a difficult time.

Sarah Quinn is a second-year Master’s student in Adult Nursing at Oxford Brookes and lives in Oxford. In addition, she is a nursing assistant – a role which she thoroughly enjoys. She also a keen interest in art, especially how this can be used as a medium for mental health promotion. She is an avid photographer with an eagle eye for seeing the beauty in the everyday.

Sarah writes: ‘The prompt for writing this poem, ‘Compassion, the life blood of the NHS’, was a call to arms by an artist who wished to roll out an art project putting up posters in staff break rooms across the whole of the NHS (you can find the artist on Instagram: @notestostrangers). He asked for inspiration of what it was like to work within the NHS and why we do what we do.

At the end of a very busy, stressful and emotionally-tolling twelve-hour shift I was walking home mulling over my day (nearly in tears). In this moment of reflection I started to write on my phone to remind myself I am there for those patients and how lucky I am to be surrounded by such amazing colleagues.

Now more than ever the NHS is a symbol of hope and needs to be protected. I have personally looked after patients suffering with COVID-19 and seen both sides of this pandemic: the pressure that this puts on family, friends, businesses and people’s way of life. So for people out there reading this, know that your everyday sacrifices are making a difference on the front line. Together we can get through this and a little compassion goes a long way.’

You can find out more about nursing at Oxford Brookes here.

Canal Street, 1984

March 5, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

He watched me for half an hour
from the jukebox. Chain-smoking,
a gold band flashed against a yellowed finger.
Through a haze of aftershave
Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’
assaulted the room.

Lips pursed at the choice of music,
a leather queen sluggishly combed his black
moustache. A fuchsia handkerchief
stuck out its tongue
from his precision-ripped
left back pocket.

Jukebox man sunk a double scotch
and three strides later, leaned over my table.
One knuckle was thick with sovereigns,
his cigarette – limp with an inch of ash –
jabbed at a beer mat, spat out
small silver rings

as he spoke. See this sheepskin coat
I’m wearing? he said to my half-a-cider.
You like it? I can get you one
if you come back to my hotel.
It was November
and I was cold.

We can become
the clothes on our bones.
The boys in the youth group
named that man ‘wolf’. He circled us
for a month of Thursday nights, dressed
in shadows and counterfeit skin.

by Ian Humphreys

The Poetry Centre’s ignitionpress recently published three new pamphlets: Hush by Majella Kelly, City Poems by Mia Kang, and Hinge by Alycia Pirmohamed. Thanks to all who attended our launches! You can find out more about the pamphlets and buy them here.

The Centre has two more events coming up next month: we’re very excited to be bringing together seven of our ignitionpress poets for a special ignitionpress Collective reading at the Poetry Café in London on Thursday 2 April. The event features Lily Blacksell, Mary Jean Chan, Patrick James Errington, Joanna Ingham, Jennifer Lee Tsai, Natalie Whittaker, and Belinda Zhawi. It is free to attend and not to be missed! Please register here in advance.

On Thursday 23 April at Waterstones here in Oxford, join us to hear from André Naffis-Sahely, James Attlee & Hasan Bamyani, This event is also free to attend, but do register here. Thank you!

In Zebra, a boy steps tentatively from the shadows onto a strobe-lit dancefloor. Ian Humphreys’ much-anticipated debut shimmers with music, wit and humour while exploring mixed identities, otherness, and coming-of-age as a gay man in 1980s Manchester. These acutely-observed, joyful poems pay homage to those who took the first steps – minority writers, LGBT civil rights activists, 70s queer night-clubbers and the poet’s own mixed-race parents.

Ian Humphreys lives in West Yorkshire. He has been widely published in journals and anthologies, such as The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Ambit, Magma and The Forward Book of Poetry 2019. Awards include first prize in the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize. In 2018, he was highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Ian is a fellow of The Complete Works, which promotes diversity, quality and innovation in British poetry. In 2017, a portfolio of his poems was published in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe Books). Read more about Ian’s work on his website.

Since its founding in 2008, Nine Arches Press has published poetry and short story collections (under the Hotwire imprint), as well as Under the Radar magazine. In 2010, two of our pamphlets were shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet prize and Mark Goodwin’s book Shod won the 2011 East Midlands Book Award. In 2017, All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Our titles have also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize, and in 2016 David Clarke’s debut poems, Arc, was longlisted for the Polari Prize. To date we have now published over ninety poetry publications. Read more about the press here and follow Nine Arches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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.