Without a parachute
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Cos is a Norwich based autistic Londoner. She had a poem shortlisted for the Grindstone Poetry Prize and published in their 2020 Anthology. As a child, she dreamed of socks that stay up and egg and chips in a café.
Skin
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Michelle Dennehy read English at Oxford University. Her poems have featured in journals including Amphibian, Bangor Literary Journal, Drawn to the Light Press and The Honest Ulsterman. Her poems have been published in anthologies from Dedalus Press and CAP Arts, Belfast.
The Fall
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David Clarke’s first pamphlet Gaud won the Michael Marks Award in 2013. He has published two collections with Nine Arches Press (most recently The Europeans in 2019) and a further pamphlet, Scare Stories, with V Press. The Field in Winter will be published by Nine Arches in the autumn of 2023.
Our featured publication for March and April is Green Apple Red by James McDermott, published by Broken Sleep Books.
James McDermott’s Green Apple Red is a dazzling pamphlet which maps the speaker’s growth from shamed ‘unnatural’ adolescent into queer adult proud of their nature. These majestic poems look towards a queerness of nature encouraging the inosculation of the reader and McDermott’s written word.
“Clear yet complex poems which lovingly interrogate queer desire to find shame, intimacy and protest in equal measure – unearthing, ultimately, a resonant wisdom in the Norfolk landscape and natural world” Richard Scott
“Green Apple Red revels in entanglements and inosculations, queering the language of nature: ‘bears’ who ‘are worshipped in sub-cultures’; an apple-eater consuming ‘only Cox’s’. In sensuous poems of belonging and longing, James McDermott carves out space for queer bodies in landscapes. These poems invite us to be shameless and public, ‘out in the open’ amongst our fellow creatures: unique, ‘fizzing with want’ like a bee, but ‘just another animal’ too. At once ‘cricket ball small’ with ‘Shame’s Stone’, but gutsy with the ‘second brain’ of the intestines, there’s abundant clarity, humour and vulnerability here, for wandering queers (and non-queers) everywhere” Caleb Parkin
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The Weight
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Shame’s Stone
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My Queer Mind Goes For A Walk
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How Queer I Live On Norfolk Coast
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James’s poetry books include the spoken word collection Manatomy (Burning Eye Books; long-listed for Polari’s First Book Prize 2021) and the pamphlets Erased (Polari Press) and Green Apple Red (Broken Sleep Books). James’s second collection Wild Life will be published by Nine Arches Press in June 2023. James’s poems have been widely
published in magazines and journals including Poetry Wales, The Cardiff Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Butcher’s Dog and Fourteen Poems. James’s plays published by Samuel French include Rubber Ring (Pleasance Islington/UK Tour) and Time and Tide (Park Theatre/UK Tour; Offie nominated for Best New Play 2020; long-listed for the Bruntwood,
Papatango and Verity Bargate Playwriting Prizes). James is also one of the writers on EastEnders, an Arvon Writing tutor and Lecturer in Scriptwriting at The University of East Anglia. Twitter – jamesliammcd, Instagram – jamesmcdermott1993
Copies of Green Apple Red are available to purchase from James’s website.
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Marine Snow
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Fiona Larkin’s pamphlets are A Dovetail of Breath (Rack Press, 2020) and Vital Capacity (Broken Sleep, 2022). Her debut collection, Rope of Sand, appears with Pindrop Press summer 2023; the title poem was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She manages innovative projects with Corrupted Poetry.
Charge Nurse
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Helen’s pamphlet, This Lexia & Other Languages (v.press) was born in 2020. She curates a project supporting dyslexic creatives. She is known on fb for her diva hen puppet, Nigella. In 2021 she was a finalist for the Brotherton Prize. Website: dyslexiapoetry.co.uk fb Helen Kay twitter: @HelenKay166
Boy as Bubble
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Leanne Moden is a poet, performer and educator, based in Nottingham. She was a national semi-finalist at the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam in 2018, and her latest collection “Get Over Yourself” was published by Burning Eye Books in 2020. https://www.leannemoden.com/ https://leannemodenpoet.bigcartel.com/
The Horses Still Run
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Jennie E. Owen has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children. Jennie is currently working on a poetry PhD with MMU.
Transcranial
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U.K. slam champion and World Slam Finalist, Kathryn O’Driscoll, is a queer disabled poet from Bath. Her debut collection ‘Cliff Notes’ was released by Verve Poetry Press in 2022.
Social Mobility
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Arthur Chapman lives in Peterborough, UK, and works in history education. His poems have appeared in the Fenland Poetry Journal and in The Meeting: Reading and Writing Through John Clare (Simon Kovesi (ed.) 2020).
atriumpoetry.com 