3:AM in Lockdown 41: Joshua Alexander & Steven J. Fowler
The Animal Drums By Joshua Alexander ansd Steven J. Fowler. @stevenjfowler
Poem Brut #86 – The Earth Fainted: Pages from a Future Fire
‘The Earth Fainted: Pages from a Future Fire’ is an extract from a poem commissioned for “Redactions / Redirections” at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2019. The source text is An Account of the Great Fire and Explosion which occurred in Newcastle-on-Tyne & Gateshead on the 6th October, 1854 (Newcastle University Special Collections: Edwin Clarke Local: Clarke 338). This recounts the fire which killed 53 people, injured many more and devastated the economic powerhouse of the city’s quayside in 1854. In my piece, pages are redacted to re-imagine messages from the industrial past in the contemporary context of climate and disaster.
In the 86th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Phoebe Power.
The fucker and the fucked: On Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season
Recent years have witnessed a new boom in Mexican fiction, with now internationally established writers like Valeria Luiselli and Yuri Herrera, working in the space opened up by Roberto Bolano’s opus 2666, staging a reckoning with the violent implications of the constant migration of bodies and drugs across the US border. Hurricane Season is an important intervention–by focusing her attention on Veracruz, the initial site of conquistador colonialism, Melchor demonstrates that the everyday lives of people who are far away from the border, who are not narcos, and who are just trying to get by, or get high, or waste time while waiting for work, are still ‘dying in the heat’, at risk of destruction at every moment.
Trahearne Falvey reviews Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor.
3:AM in Lockdown 40: Anna Vaught
Launching in Lockdown By Anna Vaught. Who would be compliant except the person who gave up? Who could accept? – Saving Lucia (Chapter Two) I love a chat. I am shy and introverted, but I love a chat. I’ve found that all this chatting — a lot of it about books and ideas and […]