7 Years Later I Still Make Laksa, 7 Years Later I Still Look for Him
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Holly Winter-Hughes is a poet, researcher and therapeutic writing facilitator with an interest in restorying embodied trauma. She has been recently published or is upcoming in Clarion, Impossible Archetype and Tears in the Fence. Her collection ‘How to Leave a Body…’ is out in May 2025 and can be pre-ordered through Verve or www.hollywinterhughes.com.
In Those Uniform Days
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Peter Raynard is a disabled working class poet and previously editor of Proletarian Poetry (www.proletarianpoetry.com). His latest collection, Manland, was published by Nine Arches Press, in 2022.
A temporary arrangement
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Ian Badcoe (he/they) is a nonbinary poet from Sheffield. He also has a long-term collaboration with German Indie Rock singer/composer Hallam London and their album: Be Yourself in Eleven Easy Lessons, is available in the usual places. Ian’s site: https://ianbadcoe.uk/ Hallam London: https://hallamlondon.com/
Hypervigilance
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Helen Evans runs two poetry projects: Inner Room, and Poems for the Path Ahead. Her debut pamphlet was ‘Only by Flying’ (HappenStance Press). Her work has been widely published in magazines, and features in ‘Mariscat Sampler One’ (Mariscat Press 2024).
Batwatching
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Ella is a writer whose work has appeared in Abridged, Poetry Ireland Review and New Word Order. She graduated from NUIG with a BA in Creative Writing in 2021, and is currently living and writing in Cork City.
I need to talk to you
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Daragh Fleming is an a writer from Cork, Ireland. His debut in nonfiction, a collection of essays on mental health called Lonely Boy, is published by BookHub Publishing. He has work appearing in many literary magazines and has been shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, and was highly commended for both the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Fool For Poetry Prize. Twitter: @daraghfleming Website: thoughtstoobig.ie
Rear View
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Sara has poems in Washing Windows IV (2024) and Her Other Language (2020). Long-listed for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing (2018) and shortlisted for North West Words (2019), Sara is undertaking a Poetry MA in QUB.
Care
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Rosalie Alston has poems printed in Kinship, Voices Along the Road, Poetry Space, Spelt, Black Lives Matter and in adoption anthologies. She has poems published online by the Poetry Village, Poetry Kit, PoetryandCovid, Dust and The Literary Platform.
Our featured publication for Winter is Deathless by Catherine Balaq, published by Verve Poetry Press.
Sex and death are truisms. We begin through the act of one and the other is the ultimate exit. This collection moves between the two, expanding on tropes of sexuality and creation acts with a core of sonnets that speak back to their origins. Both traditional and modern, the poems in Deathless turn the male gaze into the female subject and place life’s darkness in chiaroscuro contrast with beauty and light.
‘Catherine Balaq channels the daemon onto the page summoning colour from darkness.‘ Paul Lynch
‘Balaq’s words leave you breathless, burning through the page, reaching into the depths of you and making no apology for it. In ‘Deathless’ we are confronted with the complex, beautiful and exhilarating nature of being alive.’ Ophira Adar
‘Intimate, open-hearted and blazingly honest, the poems in Deathless establish Balaq as a distinctive and engaging voice. Memory and survival; wit and invention; attention to the indignities and the forcefulness of resilience; duty and wild abandon. It captures the beautiful and terrifying simultaneity of life: all of this is happening at once, is behind us, is coming our way.‘ Luke Kennard
‘Deathless turns a direct, unflinching gaze upon Freud’s twin drives – sex and death – and tracks the nuances of female desire, its ambivalences and contradictions, celebrating its incendiary agency with precision and control.‘ Meryl Pugh
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Object Relations
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Turning 30 in New York
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Whistle
Previously published in Poetry Wales, Spring 2023
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How to Winter
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Catherine Balaq is a writer and body psychotherapist. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and nominated for the Pushcart and Forward Prizes. She is co-editor of Black Cat Press. Her debut collection ‘animaginary’ was published in 2023. ‘Deathless’ is her second collection. Catherine also writes novels and is represented by Donald
Winchester at Watson Little.
Copies of Deathless are available to purchase from the Verve Poetry Press website, here.
atriumpoetry.com 