Pharmacopoeia

February 24, 2021March 22, 2022 ~ Thomas

And suddenly the plagues
are the most interesting parts
of a city’s history.

1635 stands out as the year
Yersinia Pestis took another tithe
from Amsterdam’s population
and Doctor Tulp published his pharmacopoeia
to counter all the bad plague literature.

Later, he made a Book of Monsters,
wherein blacksmith Jan de Doot
sharpened his knife
and cut out his own bladder stone.

Tulp signed the fitness reports
for the first Manhattan settlers,
whose ancestors are still singing
Trip a Trap a Tronjes
(The father’s knee is a throne)
four hundred years on –
the old rhyme meaning as much
or as little
as Ring a Ring a Roses.

I imagine a hotel bed,
two plane seats,
empty, waiting.

A space in front of ‘Wheatfield with Crows’,
where he will be overwhelmed by beauty
in a way I am trying to understand
while I brim with dark blue connective ribbons
obscuring, or highlighting,
the place where the path
meets the horizon.

by Kate Fox

News from the Poetry Centre: tune in now to hear ignitionpress poet Belinda Zhawi imagine life as a southern African plains zebra in the Becoming Animal series on Radio 3’s The Essay programme. It’s available to listen to on the BBC website.

‘Pharmacopoeia’ is copyright © Kate Fox, 2021 and is reprinted here from The Oscillations (Nine Arches Press, 2021) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website, and register for free to attend the book launch on Eventbrite (please sign up by 12pm on Thursday). If you can’t register in time, you can still watch the launch by visiting the Nine Arches YouTube channel from 7.30pm.

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

The poem ‘Pharmacopoeia’ begins poet Kate Fox’s distinctive new collection The Oscillations. The book explores distance and isolation in the age of the pandemic, refracted through the lenses of neurodiversity and trauma in poems that are bold, often frank and funny but also multifarious, dazzling and open-hearted in their self-discoveries. Fox’s poetry explores difference and community, silence and communication, danger and belonging – and a world that has been distinctly broken into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ by the pandemic. Throughout, a strong voice sings of what it means to be many things at once – autistic, creative, northern, a woman. Fox measures not only distances, social or otherwise, but how we breach them, and what the view might be from beyond them.

Read more about the collection on the Nine Arches website, and register to attend the online launch on 25 February via Eventbrite (or tune into the Nine Arches YouTube channel from 7.30pm).

Kate Fox is a poet based in Northern England who has made two comedy series for Radio 4 and written and performed numerous broadcast poetry commissions as a regular on Radio 3’s The Verb and Radio 4’s Saturday Live. She won the Andrew Waterhouse Award for poetry from New Writing North in 2006. Her previous publications include We Are Not Stone (Ek Zuban, 2006), Fox Populi (Smokestack, 2013) and Chronotopia (Burning Eye Books, 2017). She completed a PhD in performance in 2017 from the University of Leeds, researching Northernness and comedy. She loves swimming outside, spaniels, Doctor Who and big skies. You can read more about Kate’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

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.

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.

City of forbidden shrines

September 2, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was almost born in the lunar month of padded clothing
in the solar term of almost summer
in the season of ringing cicadas
in the city of forbidden shrines

almost spent a girlhood watching sandstorms
tearing through the almost golden sunlight
I almost scraped dust off my knees each day for fifteen years
almost painted paper tigers each year to burn

I could almost hold all the meanings of 家 in my mouth
without swallowing: [home, family, domestic
a measure word for every almost-place I’ve ever been]
like the swimming pool turning almost blue
or the mausoleum of almost ten thousand oranges

here I would have never breathed an ocean
never held mountains in my hands
except in almost-dreams
in which long white clouds drift
almost close enough to touch

by Nina Mingya Powles

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is closing for entries soon! Our judge this year is the Forward Prize-winning poet Fiona Benson, and as always, we have two categories: Open and English as an Additional Language. The winners receive £1000, with £200 for the runners up. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visitour website.

‘City of forbidden shrines’ is copyright © Nina Mingya Powles, 2020. It was originally published (in a slightly different form) in Literary Shanghai, and is reprinted here from Magnolia, 木蘭(Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and watch the book launch on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Notes from Nine Arches Press:

Magnolia, 木蘭, Nina Mingya Powles’ first full collection, dwells within the tender, shifting borderland between languages, and between poetic forms, to examine the shape and texture of memories, of myths, and of a mixed-race girlhood. Abundant with multiplicities, these poems find profound, distinctive joy in sensory nourishment – in the sharing of food, in the recounting of memoirs, or vividly within nature. This is a poetry deeply attuned to the possibilities within layers of written, spoken and inherited words. A journal of sound, colour, rain and light, these poems also wield their own precise and radical power to name and reclaim, draw afresh their own bold lines. Learn more about the book and buy a copy here.

Nina Mingya Powles is a poet and zinemaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (The Emma Press, 2020), and several poetry pamphlet collections including Luminescent (Seraph Press, 2017) and Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press, 2014). In 2018 she was one of three winners of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, and in 2019 won the Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. She is the founding editor of Bitter Melon苦瓜, a risograph press that publishes limited-edition poetry pamphlets by Asian writers. Find out more about Nina’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

My mother’s aria

August 10, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

My mother went into labour holding a sledge hammer
in a house with no floorboards or hot water.

My mother went to a hospital with black iron gates
6 weeks early in snow in December.
My dad took cheese sandwiches;
Wear your hair down he said.

I was backwards moving forwards
leaving my shoulder behind – my mother roared
while outside the snow got deep.

We are sorry for your loss, we will take care of your wife.
But my mother roared
and the doctor arrived from the Opera

wearing a cape to reach into my mother
and pull me out broken
to my mother’s singing.

We will look after your wife, they told my dad,
as the doctor in his cape left to catch the last aria.

by Hannah Jane Walker

The Poetry Centre’s International Poetry Competition for 2020 is open for entries! 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. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘My mother’s aria is copyright © Hannah Jane Walker, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and watch the book launch on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Hannah Jane Walker is a writer from Essex. She makes work that uses poetry as a way of talking, in theatres, public spaces and for radio, working with BBC Radio 4, the British Council, and Apples and Snakes. With collaborator Chris Thorpe, she has created interactive shows exploring questions which seem too simple to ask, winning a Fringe First and touring the world. Her plays are published by Oberon and her performance poetry by Nasty Little Press, whilst she has published poems in anthologies by Forest Fringe and Penned in the Margins. She often works with vulnerable groups, collaborating to create artworks. She is an Associate Artist for Cambridge Junction and National Centre for Writing. You can find out more about Hannah Jane on her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In 2019, Nine Arches Press launched their nationwide Primers scheme for a fifth time, in search of exciting new voices in poetry, with Jacqueline Saphra and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, three poets emerged as clear choices: Krystelle Bamford, Claire Cox, and Hannah Jane Walker.

Primers Volume Five now brings together a showcase from each of the three poets. At the core of these poems are the milestones and critical moments of our lives and, vitally, the ties that bind us to those we love: from childhood and daughterhood, through motherhood in all its array of emotions and experiences, and to beloved brothers and fathers. From the tides of grief to surfing the wave of birth, these often courageous and candid poems are distinctive in their engagement with fear, loss and self-discovery, and how they emerge afresh, bold and illuminating. An essential, insightful collection of new work from some of poetry’s most talented emerging voices. Read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

My Brother as a Mezzotint

August 3, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Eager to admire your scans’ monochrome tones
you lean forward in your wheelchair
study the luminous screen:
eclipsing your spinal cord, two dark moons;
the titanium caging your neck, pure black;
grey meat spills from your iliac’s white wing.
The locum’s chest is slim, boy-like,
his tired eyes rimmed by glasses
and concern, he answers our questions
with open hands. Not your own oncologist
he’s unsure why his prognosis seems new.
Returning down the corridor you say I’m glad
it was you who was with me, reach across
to flatter an old woman on her tiger-stripe throw
as we pass wheel to wheel, then you charm
from the receptionist, so young and so plump,
the secret of her hidden tattoo.

by Claire Cox

The Poetry Centre’s military veterans’ poetry workshop is being featured all this week on the British Forces Broadcasting Service’s radio station. Tune in online at 11.30 BST each weekday. You can also find out more about the workshop and the anthology that resulted from it on the BFBS website.

The Poetry Centre has 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. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘My Brother as a Mezzotint’ is copyright © Claire Cox, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch TONIGHT (Monday 3 August), which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm.

Born in Hong Kong, Claire Cox has an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University, where she was awarded the Blackwell’s Prize for best student. She is currently a funded part-time, practice-based research student at Royal Holloway, University of London, studying poetry and disaster. She is also co-founder and Associate Editor of ignitionpress. Her poems have appeared in Magma, Envoi, The Butcher’s Dog, Lighthouse and Ink, Sweat & Tears.

Two Lies: the deer

July 28, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

creep as only deer can
they don’t consider it creeping though –
we parade on their backs
high gloss patina-on-death
like palanquins for heartbreak
but I suspect their hearts hold only
tubers sinew bone and teeth

on the last day
you didn’t know me anymore
from under the morphine’s heavy brocade

so the deer (unmoved) move are moved
through patterns of light and sound
by some deer-shaped force within;
or they’re still as the character for deer
always bending its fine head
to the ground forever

or maybe
you knew but couldn’t say
mixing as you were
with light and sound
your words moving away

no the deer in lacquered heels creep
crowned in grief through bracken halls
they creep towards us
under dimmet’s low eaves
embroidered with sorrow
they’re creeping for us

and yes
it’s me hold me close
hold me higher still
I’m coming I’m home
I’ll see you soon

by Krystelle Bamford

Our latest podcast features Jennifer Wong, who talks to Niall Munro about her exciting new collection Letters Home 回家. Jennifer reads and talks about three poems, and explores topics such as the Chinese family, her use of Cantonese and English languages in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. You can listen to the podcast here, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

The Poetry Centre has 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. The deadline for entries is 14 September. For more details and to enter, visit our website.

‘Two Lies: the deer’ is copyright © Krystelle Bamford, 2020. It is reprinted from Primers Volume Five (Nine Arches Press, 2020) by permission of Nine Arches Press. Read more about the book here, and join Nine Arches and the poets for the online book launch on Monday 3 August, which will be live-cast to the Nine Arches YouTube channel at 7.30pm. We’ll be sharing poems from the other two poets featured in the latest volume of Primers over the next fortnight.

Krystelle Bamford’s poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Under the Radar, and a number of anthologies. She was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Raised in the US, she now lives in Scotland where she has worked at Canongate Books, completed a Creative Writing MLitt at the University of St Andrews, and gave birth to two wee, radge kids. You can read more about Krystelle’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

of butterflies

July 22, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Zhuang Zi said
the man does not know

if he dreams of a butterfly
or is it the butterfly dreams

of a man. It is unclear
who awakens first or from where.

Neither do I
know after all these years

if I am a Chinese girl who
wanted to go home

or a woman from Hong Kong
who will stay in England.

It’s British summer time
in my living room

but my watch in the drawer
moves seven hours ahead.

The past: is the door still open?
The future: am I a filial daughter,

living so far away from my parents?
Wearing her marmalade camouflage,

the butterfly of unknowing
pollinates in one world and another.

by Jennifer Wong

Our latest podcast features this week’s poet, Jennifer Wong, who talks to Niall Munro about her exciting new collection Letters Home 回家. Jennifer reads and talks about three poems, including ‘of butterflies’, and explores topics such as the Chinese family, her use of Cantonese and English languages in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. You can listen to the podcast here, and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Jennifer Wong was born and brought up in Hong Kong. She now lives in the UK and works as a writer, translator and teacher. She has published three collections: Goldfish (2013), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl – a pamphlet with Bitter Melon Poetry (2019), and most recently Letters Home 回家 , published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, which was selected as a Wild Card Choice by the Poetry Book Society. Jennifer is an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and also teaches at The Poetry School and City Lit in London. You can find out more about Jennifer’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Letters Home 回家, Jennifer Wong’s vivid third collection of poems, unravels the complexities of being between nations, languages and cultures. Travelling across multiple borders of history and place, these poems examine what it means to be returning home, and whether it is a return to a location, a country or to a shared dream or language. The poet Hannah Lowe has called it ‘a remarkable collection, which makes a new and bold contribution to the genre of diaspora literature.’ Find out more and order a copy via the Nine Arches website.

For which we have no names

July 7, 2020March 28, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

She works one day a week
in a building which also houses
a Centre for Synaptic Plasticity,
and each time she sees the sign
she wants to go in and say,
Take my brain, bend it,
it’s not behaving. She has

of late, and for no reason,
been atrabilious, a word
she learned recently
which sums up her state
perfectly: a mix
of irritability and melancholy.
Scientists have suggested

we can’t feel emotions
we have no names for. This,
she thinks, is impossible
to prove. How do we know
what anyone means when they say anger,
when they say jealousy, when they say love?
She walks past the sign again, longing
to be wired up, explained. Who am I,
she’d say. Tell me my name.

by Tania Hershman

‘For which we have no names’ is copyright © Tania Hershman, 2017. It is reprinted from Terms and Conditions (Nine Arches Press, 2017) by permission of Nine Arches Press. You can read more about the book here.

Tania Hershman’s debut poetry collection, Terms and Conditions, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2017 and urges us to consider all the possibilities and read life’s small print before signing on the dotted line. These beautifully measured poems bring their stoical approach to the uncertain business of our daily lives – and ask us to consider what could happen if we were to bend or break the rules, step outside the boundaries and challenge the narrative. In feats of imagination and leaps of probability, falling simply becomes flying, a baby collects the data and scrolls through everything it sees, and there are daring acts of vanishing and recreation. Be wary, for even the evidence here often leads us astray. And in between this, Hershman’s precise poetry elegantly balances the known, unknown and unknowable matter of existence, love and happiness, weighing the atoms of each, finding just the exact words that will draw up the perfect contract of ideas. You can read more about the book on the Nine Arches website.

Tania Hershman‘s poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, was joint winner of Live Canon’s 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition and was published in November 2019, whilst her hybrid particle-physics-inspired book and what if we were all allowed to disappear was published by Guillemot Press in March 2020. Tania is also the author of the poetry collection Terms and Conditions, a poetry chapbook and three short story collections, and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is co-creator of @OnThisDayShe, curator of short story hub ShortStops and has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. Hear her read her work on Soundcloud, find out more about her work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

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 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 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.

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.

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.