‘I wrote these on a day where I was ill and too tired to walk down the stairs. I felt vulnerable and empty. Writing helped to comfort myself a little. What I write, comes from the inside. I do not really think I just write down what I feel. I listen to my belly. These things would never come out of my mouth, but they do come from my body.’
In the 75th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ika Schwander.
Two looks to the many maps published in recent years by a plethora of news outlets of Syria/Iraq, which show the shifts of geographic territory controlled by various governments, militias, and coalitions over time. It aims to combine the experience of reading these maps with fragments of individual story to create a multi-level portrait of the chaos, fear, boredom, and longing for stability that accompany armed conflict.
In the 74th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by C Harrison
Bank of bitterness
If tomorrow
has to stop
today
L` aube se rendort
Mbess
In the 73rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Landa wo
Lionel’s Star is a tiny, pink Planet that had been under the rule of Earth from 1948 until last year, in 2018, when they won a great war and overthrew their colonisers for good. There are six different languages spoken on the Planet and the texts above are translations into some of these languages. Some of the rules for translating this language to English are as follows.
1. If two words (in a row) begin with the same letter, omit that letter from the second word (and third and fourth etc). For example, “it is” becomes “it s”
2. A word cannot end in the same letter another begins with, so “she is sleeping” becomes ” she is leeping”
3. Definite articles indicate predictions, so the sentence “when the war comes” becomes ” when war comes” because we don’t actually want a war.
In the 72nd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Radha Patel.
This suicide note was typed feverishly on my grandmother’s typewriter. I’m not suicidal, just to be clear. I only wondered what I’d say if I had to say something before offing myself. Turns out, not too much.
In the 71st of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Medha Singh.
I’ve been a joiner for 20(!) years now spending a great deal of time looking at architectural drawings. A lot of my writing process is made up of notes scrawled on these drawings or on scraps of wood at my bench and these restrictions of thought and process have heavily influenced my forthcoming book Contained (Hesterglock Press). These four texts/drawings are ideas that I’m kicking around for the final manuscript.
In the 70th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by David Turner.
“Sky Writing” is a multi-layered project.
We found the images — prints from a disposable camera — at a thrift store. I free-wrote on the images with marker, and Karolina “translated” my asemic writing into English.
I then letterpressed her text on Domtar Feltweave paper and attached the images, which I mounted on black card stock.
In the 16th of the Duos series and 69th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ryan Mihaly and Karolina Zapal.
Do we think that it is sad and regrettable that such a charming family has to leave their house, but that there is simply nothing to be done?
We do, sadly.
Do we think the memories that a family has of the house they lived in mean nothing?
Of course not.
Do we think that those memories remain in the house, having seeped into the fabric of the building?
We think that probably a bit sentimental.
In the 68th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michael O’Mahony.
Awoken several times in the night for weeks, I began rising in the dark to write down my dreams. Sometimes it was easier to draw a line instead, to indicate something more of an affect or intensity. Other times the dreams were ripe with narrative. Mostly I was semi-conscious; everything was often a mess. I’d start to write of a moment and find the marks of a previous dream seeping through its surface, the bounds of one dream would bleed into the next. There was often the appearance of memory. I spilled black ink on my sheets, I fell asleep at the curl of an imprecise letter. These are some of the more legible pages.
In the 67th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Maria Sledmere.
While on the surface these might just be abstract poems they are apt and true explorations of my own experience of loss, love, death of relationships, rebirth, objectification, heartbreak and sex work (to name a few). I like to think of them as my own subconscious musing on the concept of family, the idea of marriage, the inevitability of bad luck and the fundamental beauty of the mundane.
The marriage of the books, two of which are my only real physical evidence of a father, excluding my own existence, and the third being a Greek classic bought with my boyfriend, which despite the painfully obvious Freudian undertones also shows the marriage of the two foreign languages together to create something weirder/perhaps more beautiful than themselves.
In the 66th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Kathy Pendrill.
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