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With 19 new issues added to our shelves in March, here are a few highlights:
Issue 24 of The White Review is a must-read this month for contemporary poetry lovers. Mary Ruefle explores her own writing process in a unique interview. Karen McCarthy Woolf also has two spell-binding poems featured. This latest edition also showcases up-and-coming talented poets - Rebecca Tamás, who released her first full-length poetry collection WITCH in March, pens an article exploring the relationship between poetry and the occult, and analysing the societal history of women deemed as witches. We love this issue’s beautiful cover too, created by artist Anthea Hamilton who is interviewed within its pages.
Within the unassuming stapled A4 pages of Splinter’s fifth issue, readers are presented with a variety of radical formal experiments in poetry. Highlights include a selection of Iris Colomb’s sound-based Soliflores, and ‘SEA SPACE PLAGUE’, a poem-play by Mendoza, Macpherson & Hardy, composed of improvisation and found text. There is also a review of This Glittering Republic by Quenton Baker, whose ‘Untitled Erasures’ begin the proceedings in this issue. For those eager to explore more poetry along the same lines, the back of the magazine has useful, carefully curated lists of recent book and pamphlet publications, magazines and regular events and reading series.
Oxford Poetry may sound and look very traditional but the hint of illustration along its spine is an indication that titles and looks can be deceptive. On opening the magazine you are confronted by wonderfully illustrated endpapers and for the Winter 2018/19 issue they are designed by Swedish based British artist Rudy Loewe. The editors put out a call for submissions on the theme of Europe as we teeter on the edge of Brexit. The result is by no means a European love-in; George Szirtes states in his essay 'Je Suis Européen' that for the generations of his Jewish family “Europe has been both hope and terror” and there is a challenging interview with Sharmilla Beezmohun, co-founder of Speaking Volumes, about race, class and the “Alice in Wonderland moment” that was Poetry Parnassus (something very close to our hearts) during the 2012 London Olympics. Poems include the long poem 'Reverse Colonisation' by Amit Majmudar, Anthony Anaxagorou on Cyprus in 'Ecumene' - the colony that Britain forgot - and Kathryn Simmonds’ post-Brexit nightmare 'Possible Side Effects', which includes “Decreased interest in the garden of one’s neighbour”.