Search results for ""Author Margie"

Where can the poem go in the age of the supercomputer? Why is poetry taught so badly at school? What do Wordsworth, Byron and British rapper Roots Manuva have in common? Would Emily Dickinson have watched vampire series Twilight? Is slam poetry any good, and what is "postavant" anyway? These are just some of the questions posed in Stress Fractures, a new and wide-ranging collection of essays on the future of poetry."Good news for poetry."Richard Morrison, The Times on Penned in the MarginsTom Chivers was born in 1983 in south London. A writer, editor and promoter of poetry, his publications include The Terrors (2009) and How To Build A City (2009). A winner of the inaugural Crashaw Prize, he is Associate Editor of Tears in the Fence, was Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London, and has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tom is Director of Penned in the Margins and Co-Director of the London Word Festival.

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Tom Chivers was born in South London in 1983. His publications include How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009), The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets) and, as editor, the anthologies Generation Txt, City State: New London Poetry and Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry (Penned in the Margins, 2006, 2009 & 2010). A regular reviewer for Poetry London, he presented a documentary about the poet Barry MacSweeney for BBC Radio 4 in 2009. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011.

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Futures features some of the most daring new voices in Greek poetry, together with international poets with Greek connections. These bold, impassioned and critically aware texts stake new poetic and political ground: they articulate what it means to live in a time when capitalism is buckling under its own weight.

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Out for Air is the exhilarating first collection by former professional skateboarder Olly Todd. Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Each poem is its own event: expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut. Todd writes with a tangible physicality, solid as a curb, so that the language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' LUKE KENNARD

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In Heavy Time psychogeographer Sonia Overall takes to the old pilgrim roads, navigating a route from Canterbury to Walsingham via London and her home town of Ely. Vivid in her evocation of a landscape of ancient chapels, ruined farms and suburban follies, Overall's secular pilgrimage elevates the ordinary, collecting roadside objects - feathers, a bingo card, a worn penny - as relics. Facing injury and interruption, she takes the path of the lone woman walker, seeking out 'thin places' where past and present collide, and where new ways of living might begin. 'It is a talisman of a book. Heavy Time doesn't just describe a pilgrimage, it becomes one, for both writer and reader. It is an invitation to resist 'busyness', to think of ourselves as explorers, to seek out 'the everyday divine'. It has sent me out looking for 'thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through.' Beautiful and essential.' - Helen Mort

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A knife is pulled. An Uber driver is racially abused on the day of the Brexit referendum. A father bathes his son in ice water. A schoolboy drives a drawing pin into a map of the world. The threat of violence is never far away in Anthony Anaxagorou's breakthrough collection After the Formalities. Technically achieved, emotionally transformative and razor-sharp, these are poems that confront and contradict; poems in which the scholarly synthesises with the streetwise, and global histories are told through the lens of one family. Anaxagorou 'speaks against the darkness', tracking the male body under pressure from political and historical forces, and celebrates the precarious joy of parenthood. The title poem is a meditation on racism and race science that draws on the poet's Cypriot heritage and is as uncomfortable as it is virtuosic. Elsewhere, in a sequence of prose poems that shimmer with lyric grace, he writes, 'I'm your father & the only person keeping you alive.' Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize A Poetry Society Recommendation A Guardian Poetry Book of the Year One of The Telegraphs Best Poetry Books of 2019

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Shortlisted for the Costa 2019 Poetry Award. . Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden Prize. Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough. These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom' where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a 'fractal coast' full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.

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A Poetry Book Society recommendation; A book of the year - the Poetry School; The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the `inscape' of the living world. In this powerful new collection, presented as a museum of artefacts, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darklycomic and a true original.

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Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough’s tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love. Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton’s gay scene,& Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize. Spacecraft & navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people.

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In his ambitious second full collection, Ross Sutherland is an uneasy observer of our age of inauthenticity, hacked computers and digital avatars. Emergency Window features new poems alongside excerpts from two recent sequences, including a hilarious and strangely prescient version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', a poem written using Google Streetview, sonnets inspired by the Street Fighter 2 video game, and a sequence of computer-generated translations of classic literature.Surreal, funny, intelligent and experimental, these poems chart a search for meaning in a disintegrating world."If he were a piece of furniture, he would be an elegant high stool that felt uncomfortable and stylish at the same time."Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3"Sparky, surprising, joyous poetry" Roddy LumsdenRoss Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. His first collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2009, followed by the limited-edition mini-book Twelve Nudes in 2010 and the free National Poetry Day e-book Hyakuretsu Kyaku in 2011. Ross regularly appears at the Aldeburgh, Manchester, Glastonbury and Latitude Festivals; he is taking his latest show, Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke, to the Edinburgh Fringe 2012. He lives in Cambridge.

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One of The Times' "ten rising stars of British poetry".'Kalagora' is a Hindi neologism meaning 'black man / white man'. This book tells his story: from a wild Millennium eve party in Manhattan to homecoming amid the grime and glory of London's East End. In this dazzling debut collection by Siddhartha Bose, the global wanderer pays witness to traffic accidents and street surrealism in Mumbai – the irresistible 'city of motion' – observing the uncanny and the unexpected at the start of the 21st century. Across continents and time-zones, a story emerges of love, chaos and addiction, a tale that evokes the colour and raw energy of these hybrid, multi-cultural cities. "Bose's métier is a kind of breathless urban Romanticism… daring the reader to keep up."Simon TurnerSiddhartha Bose is a poet and performer based in London. He grew up in Mumbai and Calcutta, followed by a seven year itch in the USA. Selections of his work have appeared in the anthologies City State: New London Poetry(Penned in the Margins, 2009) and Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). Bose has recently completed a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he also teaches poetry and Shakespeare. He is playwright-in-residence with WhynotTheatre, Toronto.

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Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.' 'An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.' -Kerri ni Dochartaigh

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Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel PrizePlunge into mountain lakes and drift along meandering rivers in Swims, the debut poetry collection by Elizabeth-Jane BurnettA long poem taking many forms, Swims begins and ends in Devon, moving across the waterways of England and Wales: from urban pond to open sea. The poet swims among fishermen on Grasmere, reimagines the body as bottle cap in the Channel, and clambers down the bank of the river Ouse with words scrawled on her swimsuit.As political as they are personal, these meditations are conceived as environmental acts that probe the relationship between landscape, memory and the self. A sinuous, innovative debut, Swims reminds us of the power of swimming to transform the human spirit, registering what the water gives to us and what it takes away.

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Set in the urban pastoral of an East London postcode, Feral Borough asks what it means to call a place home, and how best to share that home with its non-human inhabitants. Meryl Pugh reimagines the wild as 'feral', recording the fauna and flora of Leytonstone in prose as incisive as it is lyrical. Here, on the edge of the city, red kite and parakeets thrive alongside bluebell and yarrow, a muntjac deer is glimpsed in the undergrowth, and an escaped boa constrictor appears on the High Road. In this subtle, captivating book - part herbarium, part bestiary and part memoir - Pugh explores the effects of loss, and lockdown, on human well-being, conjuring the local urban environment as a site for healing and connection. 'A subtle, heartfelt and affecting book about home, the city and the self -- Pugh reminds us that nowhere, however urban, is without nature; that wherever we go, the intricate web of life continues to shape and change us.' Rebecca Tamas

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Fiery, feminist and funny, Darling, It’s Me is the first collection by Norwich-based writer and academic Alison Winch. Winch combines refreshing explorations of marriage and motherhood with re-imaginings of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and rebuttals to the 'great' (male) philosophers of the Enlightenment. Fusing philosophical interrogation with humour and pop cultural resonances, Darling, It’s Me plots new ground for confessional poetry.; "One of the cleverest, filthiest, most incendiary debuts I’ve ever read." CLARE POLLARD

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Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.Literary investigator Chris McCabe pushes back the tangled ivy and hacks his way through the poetic history of south-east London, revealing a map of intense artistic activity with Nunhead at its heart: from Barry MacSweeney in Dulwich to Robert Browning and William Blake in Peckham.Join McCabe on a journey back in time along underground rivers, through Elizabethan villages and urban woodland. Discover the surprising lives and lines of writers neglected amongst the moss-covered monuments of Nunhead Cemetery: from the 'Laureate of the Babies' and a New Zealander soldier-poet to those who chronicled London at the height of her industrial powers.But this is also a personal journey that highlights poetry's force in overcoming trauma; McCabe's exploration of Nunhead Cemetery is interwoven with diary entries that document his mother's illness.In this latest instalment in an ambitious project to plot the dead poets of the Magnificent Seven - London's great Victorian cemeteries - McCabe drills deep into the psyche of the city, and into his own past.Encounters with the dead and forgotten are charted in sinuous prose and with a wry humour that belies his meticulous research. Cenotaph South offers a powerful meditation on art, writing, memory and community, confirming McCabe as contemporary poetry's most innovative thinker. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the canon, or beyond the cemetery gates.

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"Intimate and haunting." The Guardian.The Good Dark is the place we go to remember. The Good Dark is the place we go to take account. In his powerful second collection, Ryan Van Winkle charts loves won and loves lost. A lyric voice that is both familiar and strangely different leads us through the forests of memory and towards a grim acknowledgement of the obligation to get up, to be careful, to move.Ryan Van Winkle was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His debut collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, was published by Salt in 2010. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Guardian and Scotland on Sunday. He has performed the poetry/theatre show Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel at Battersea Arts Centre, London Literature Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it was the 6th highest rated show of 2012. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2012. He lives in Edinburgh, where he is Poet in Residence at Edinburgh City Libraries.

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An industrial accident in a wire factory and the chance discovery of a birth certificate. Church services held in a ruined swimming pool. An unidentified elephant skull.Midland tells the stories of three young women as they fight to find their feet amidst the accumulated rubble of the twentieth century. From the bombsites of the 1940s to the construction sites of the 1960s and the school halls and decaying tower blocks of the 1980s, Honor Gavin has created an ingenious narrative of one Midlands family that is also a startling, anarchic history of a city.Composed in electric prose that soars and dives, blending keenly observed dialect with urban theory, cinema, farcical digressions and surrealist timekeeping, Midland is a novel out of time but in the middle of everything.

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Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poems from the UKWhere Rockets Burn Through is a ground-breaking anthology of sci-fi poetry, featuring poems from over thirty writers currently living and working in the United Kingdom, including Joe Dunthorne, W.N. Herbert, Ross Sutherland, Ron Butlin, Ken MacLeod, Jane Yolen, Aiko Harman, Jon Stone, Kirsten Irving, Lorraine Mariner, Chrissy Williams, plus work by the late Edwin Morgan, a pioneer of sci-fi poetics.From alternate worlds and dystopian futures to alien landings and photon guns, this collection of interstellar poems will delight and excite Trekkie and poetry fan alike.Russell Jones is an Edinburgh-based writer, editor and researcher. His chapbook of science fiction poems, The Last Refuge, was published in 2009 by Forest Press. He is guest editor for the Interdisciplinary Science Review and is currently completing his PhD in Creative Writing and tutoring in Scottish Literature at Edinburgh University.

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Bodypopping Belgians and bicycle couriers populate a world of public fountains and archaeological debris in this original and eclectic collection by James Wilkes.Weather A System includes poems, found text, scripts, ephemera and imaginary reviews; subversive broadcasts that cut through the 'civil drizzle' of contemporary life. Wilkes' work excavates the present, looting and salvaging to craft an innovative, playful and multi-dimensional poetics. Weather A System captures shifts of weather, power and fashion: an energetic and darkly witty intervention in an eroded culture. "James Wilkes views the city 24/7 from a podium of his own. When he talks he talks quickly, capturing the details that pedestrians miss: the shuffle of clothes, the background tracks. His ambition is to move with the flaneurial swagger that knows the city is always subject to the ever-shifting weather. Through the commuter and traffic crush, as the crowds run for cover, the poet exposes himself under 'a cavernous pigeon sky'. Because the forecasts for gloom were long since predicted by himself his energy never flags and his wit doesn't err. It's Apollinaire's rain that runs through his ink though he opts instead to leave the Little Car behind and send by courier. Where others find congestion and grime Wilkes cuts between the parnassian dead freights, weaving the forms that function for now: reviews, questionnaries, plays. 'Who would not want to glamorize these fast people?'."Chris McCabe"The eagerly anticipated new collection by James Wilkes does not disappoint. It has genuine range and depth, is ambitious in scope and artfully enjoys the possibilities and playfulness of discourse. 'The Review Pages' section in particular reverberates beyond its beguiling humour and the 'Collected Civil Ephemera' gleans a sure psycho-geographical harvest. There is much to savour in this stimulating and inspiring collection. I thoroughly recommend a poem a day."David Caddy"Wilkes keeps his 'ethereal cannonade' going right through to the end, gathering up the debris of weather reports and fashion shows alike and reassembling them into tottering word-sculptures, ransacking everything from books to pub chatter for pieces which he can fit together into some out-of-control jigsaw. [...] this is a book where the pleasure is in the technicolour range of the language and the urgent sense of not quite being there."Jon StoneJames Wilkes was born in Poole in 1980. A graduate of Oxford University and UEA, he has taught English in Japan and writes art criticism. Interior Traces, a radio drama about brain imaging technologies, was broadcast in 2009. His previous publications include Ex Chaos, A DeTour (both Renscombe Press, 2006) and Reviews (Burner Veer, 2009). A selection of his work was included in the anthology Generation Txt (Penned in the Margins, 2006). In 2008 he started a PhD on the construction of landscape in the Isle of Purbeck.

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I believed that Fukayama line: the end of history. But History didn't end, did it? Logan Dankworth, columnist and Twitter warrior, grew up romanticising the political turmoil of the 1980s. Now, as the EU Referendum looms he is determined to be in the fray of the biggest political battle for years. Meanwhile, Logan's wife Megan wants to leave London to better raise their daughter. As tensions rise at home and across the nation, something is set to be lost forever. The third of Luke Wright's trilogy of political verse plays looks at trust and privilege in the age of Brexit. "Poet Luke Wright doesn't mince his words. His performances rumble with rage, passion and humour. They are also peppered with brilliantly smart observations. You will leave his show brimming with energy, heart pounding and brain whirring." The Guardian

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We all want something to believe in. It's 1987 and Frankie Vah gorges on love, radical politics, and skuzzy indie stardom. But can he keep it all down? Following the multi award-winning What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, Luke Wright's second verse play deals with love, loss and belief, against a backdrop of grubby indie venues and 80s politics. Expect frenetic guitars, visceral verse, and a Morrissey-sized measure of heartache. Written and performed in deft verse by Fringe First and Stage Award for Acting Excellence winner Luke Wright. 'Pulsating, poetic story-telling' **** (Lyn Gardner, Guardian).

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