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I put tabs on the following poems
At Purteen Harbour by Jane Clarke
‘Avoid Direct Contact With the Skull’ by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Third Gender Sonnet by Kandace Siobhan Walker
My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce by Kathryn Bevis
The School of Australia by Chen Chen
Forget by Majella Kelly
SUPER KING by Victoria Kennefick
Like This (Polari Version) by Adam Lowe
Virtual Thanksgiving by Geoffrey Philip
Buy it from Broken Sleep Books
Adam is a Fourteen Poems poet – the poems are strong…
I put a tag in Bathhouse
Steam rises, a question in the room:
wet, dripping and mingling with sweat.
It’s hard to age a person from their genitals
alone, much less the way they yearn.
Somewhere in a darkroom, a man pulls
secrets out of another man. We men have long
held our motives for coming, this non-place
its organic edges, for meeting eyes as if through
an amoeba’s membrance. The lamps are dimmed,
we all believe, to preserve fantasy; we fear light
will reveal how gently we touch ourselves.
But other poems that I also remembered were;
The Boys Are Killing Their Sims On the Family PC
Cotton-Collared Mafiosi – because when me and a friend told our teacher we were being bullied by a kid in a lower year we were entirely gas-lit – two kids who didn’t yet know their were queer the victims of toxic masculinity from above and below!
Concrete Quarterly
After watching the amazing Invisible Boys I was keen to explore more of Holden Sheppard’s word.
The Black Flower is a short story that is gut wrenching – honest about the damage passed through generations – confronting about the destructive nature of addiction – written so well.
Also included is A Man – an even shorter story – a day, ordinary, but told with a punch that makes us pay attention.
Both examples of the greater skill is to write short stories, complete in themselves, than long stories.
Jay plays with “form” – for example the poem “Twitter Is My Deadname” is the shape of the once familiar bird logo.
Some of the images were powerful – as when the poem “The Popped Football” touched a nerve.
The third part of the collection is a collaboration piece – and Jay treatment of the experiences of others is tender and skilful.
I will start with a spoiler alert – in talking about this book I will be talking about the plot…
The literary conceit of this work is that it is David Wan’s memoir, his telling of his story, which in the final pages after David’s death becomes the task of his partner. What does this add? Not much, for the largest part it reads as a standard novel.
There are some key facts in the story, David goes to a Public School on a bursary, and the power dynamic with the family that provided that bursary, despite their kindness to David, which is toxic. David is of mixed heritage and is othered because he is seen as “non-white”, but having been brought up in England by his English Mother, he doesn’t really have a connection to the thing that causes him to be othered. David is gay. David’s mother enters a long-term relationship with another women. The son of the family that provide the bursary, Giles, is the shadow to the story, a Brexit championing politician – he lurks on the sidelines of the story but has no real part to play. David becomes a successful actor. David dies as the result of a racial and homophobic assault – even in his final moments he is defined by his “otherness”.
I think I enjoyed it as a collection of short stories, as a whole it didn’t engage – Hollinghurst work has also had a strong social / political commentary – but the two other novels of his I have read were published some years before I read them, time creates a certain detachment from the situations and the commentary – while we are still living the post-Brexit post-COVID lives that Hollinghurst is commenting on here, and maybe there is a rawness about it all that is difficult.
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Read this on the train on way to Pilgrim Cross, it is a book that has been on the pile for a while and the selection of a book about a pilgrimage to Walsingham to read on the train to my own pilgrimage to Walsingham was not intentional.
Sonia Overall writes in a way that gives you a strong sense of place, that takes you on the journey and captures that particular essence of encounter you get when walking which other modes of travel can’t provide.
That her first attempt to get to Walsingham ends in A&E touches on the physically of pilgrimage, not that you should injury yourself but that it is an embodied activity.
A couple of quotes that made me smile:
“You have heard the call. You know what you need to do: you are going to walk to Walsingham.” (p19)
“Every time I see the fens sweep out like this it gives me the same tightness in the chest, that ache of vastness. Some people get this from looking at mountains or a clear night sky. For me, it is that formidable call to the horizon: flat fields, wide open and coal black…” (p191)
On This Stretch of Queerland by Dale Booton
A rich pamphlet, and it brought me joy that 2 of the poems had previously been published in &Change – there is clearly a natural overlap between Fourteen Poems and &Change.
One of the poems (which you can hear Dale read on the Fourteen Poems Instagram)
Dining Out
you introduce me to your favourite Chinese food
double fired chicken doused in chillies
and my throat flares at the sight of them lips already crying out
for water you grin watch my face chopsticks
poised like the front legs of a praying mantis
I strike snatch up a fair amount toss it into the trembling
abyss while chewing I focus on your face
coke-glass eyes night-framed glasses nosey tongue
try to distract myself from the napalm spice
dare not look towards the oasis of water
a fork away what do you think my voice
tries to battle its way through the flames wants to tell you
that there is no taste like the taste of your names
in my mouth but instead falters at it’s nice but a bit hot for me
Pick Up Your Feelings by Christopher Lloyd
I am pleased to report there is a &change cross over in this pamphlet too, Christopher’s poems mostly focus on a candid view of contemporary “dating” - especially the sequence alt
One of the poems
catfish makes me cry
every time
like sending nudes
& being left
on read
your heart a mushroom
think with salt
massages in brine
stored up
for when you vanish
again
your mother is calling me
red flags
billow in your selfie
If I Were Erol by Kann K/Yas Necati
These are such smart poems – I really loved them – I tagged the following:
Poems to my names I
Handsome
I am not an answer
Sacimi kesebilir misin? ( Can you cut my hair?)
Sometimes I am more boy than brave
which concludes
…
i have smiled like hope before.
i have loved like hope before.
i will smile like hope again.
i will love like hope again.
Poems to my names III
Faith
Symmetric of Bone by Troy Cabida
The jewellery of Elsa Peretti is the inspiration for these poems, and the results are jewel like, precise and on occasion cutting…
I put tags in:
Pearls in a Thumbprint Bowl
Victoria Embankment Park, 2023
On Normativity, which concludes “… | Have my ashes forged into a diamond | set on a chain or a gold band, | a setting so clean | I’ll spend this next chapter of my life | flicking light at the still-living.”
Symmetric
Citrine
Bone
Elsa Peretti II, New York 1975
