REVIEW: COLIN BANCROFT’S ‘KNIFE EDGE’

REVIEW: COLIN BANCROFT’S ‘KNIFE EDGE’

REVIEW: COLIN BANCROFT’S ‘KNIFE EDGE’     By Stella Backhouse   If the title of Colin Bancroft’s 2022 pamphlet Knife Edge brings to mind a straight line and nothing else, then you’re getting only half the picture. In fact, Knife Edge is already a clever play on...
Cork-Coventry Poetry Exchange 2023: Part One

Cork-Coventry Poetry Exchange 2023: Part One

  It’s that time again! The annual Cork-Coventry poetry exchange is now in its fifteenth year. Two rising stars of Coventry’s local poetry and spoken word scene, Devjani Bodepudi and John Watson, have been selected to represent the city this year, which...
REVIEW: HOLLY MAGILL’S ‘20’

REVIEW: HOLLY MAGILL’S ‘20’

REVIEW: HOLLY MAGILL’S ‘20’     By Stella Backhouse   20 is quite possibly the shortest title of any collection I’ve reviewed. But even though it consists of just two little characters, the most important part of it is arguably neither of them: it’s the space in...
INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS LKN

INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS LKN

INTERVIEW: FIRE & DUST MEETS LKN     fairytales are dying odes, as knights in shining cum charged every inch of my skin, pummelling through fingered hours of early morning. i felt it—the barrage of their manhood, the scathing of their nails, the excavation of...
REVIEW: PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA’S ‘FEED THE BEAST’

REVIEW: PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA’S ‘FEED THE BEAST’

REVIEW: PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA’S ‘FEED THE BEAST’     By Stella Backhouse   In a 2020 interview for Belfast-based film-making charity esc films, Irish Poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama spoke about the experience of being a gay man in the Catholic church: “I...