The Spring Issue | 2025
Herewith, our (late) Spring Issue, breaking the cold in anticipation of lazy months to come. Check back daily for new poems, stories and more.
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Herewith, our (late) Spring Issue, breaking the cold in anticipation of lazy months to come. Check back daily for new poems, stories and more.
I took my nails into my thighs and smiled. I looked at your hands on the steering / wheel, drumming. I willed them to swerve us all into a tragedy tasting of concrete. / I suddenly saw myself in another ten years, still sitting there, humming.
Dear Bill: I’m sorry to hear you’re dead. / You hated the fig-leaf euphemisms / Of pulpit-jockeys who peddle heavens, / So you’d like me calling this spade a spade: // I died a bit myself, when I heard.
Geoffrey pulls his hand from his pocket and withdraws the four-inch handle of a switchblade knife. Jason’s face turns ghostly. The American yells and runs out the door, causing his friend to follow. Most of the others never saw what Geoffrey showed the White man, although they laugh at the commotion it causes and applaud the result.
I dreamt kindness to animals was widespread, / Their demand on our powers greater and still greater. // If a rope broke, we released the herd. / If a drop of rain fell, we unveiled a flock of birds.
The big story is the old dog dying slowly, / half her mouth working tender bits / she is hand fed, strokes or tumor / or both, unsettling her stomach. / The big story, her good days, little one / her bad.
When I told my mother she has dementia, / she said that of course she’d get dementia / because her mom had Alzheimer’s but // she doesn’t have that yet because she remembers
I take my leave of mother, she gives me / a key, but there is / no key, only her hand stretching out / and
I read something— / an idea worth noting, / and when I dog-eared the / page it bent easily / along the memory / of
And in the end we are happy only when everything pauses,
and the fullness of the world fits
into the flutter of a curtain in
You say utterance is when word becomes law, is held or holds itself in the air like an accident of heaven.
When I told my mother she has dementia, / she said that of course she’d get dementia / because her mom had Alzheimer’s but //
there is no time for tears, there never is; / no time for breathing deep. / A fit of sadness is like pulling a door
No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.
He didn’t recognize me, or else pretended not to see me. A neighbour who doesn’t say hello. I’m a neighbour who is see-through, perhaps completely invisible, not
My sister bought me a “Sucka Free” hoodie in the ‘80s when Yo! MTV Raps was hot. I wore that shirt till the hole under
Geoffrey pulls his hand from his pocket and withdraws the four-inch handle of a switchblade knife. Jason’s face turns ghostly. The American yells and runs
Horror stares back at me surreptitiously from every corner of the flat with wide-open cats’ eyes. The reflexes I had of old have become alien
He is not our first dead tourist. We have had copter incidents, people cutting legs on ice, avalanche victims. One lady fell down a mine
LIKABLE? WHO CARES! Two years ago, after suffering a string of losses, the most devastating of which was the death of my beloved father,
THE CAGE DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN – by Tom Bass Editor’s Note: This essay by Tom Bass celebrates and explores the Tangier of Paul
WHO IS A CONTEMPORARY POET? What does it mean to be a contemporary poet? It’s a trickier question than it seems, and not
B O D Y reviews new pamphlets by David Kinloch, James Appleby, and Sophie Cooke.
Hostovsky’s fondness for words and keen ear for spoken language benefit his writing: he can record and create dialogue in a brilliant and natural way. In this respect, he has more in common with short-story writers than with most contemporary poets, who tend to avoid direct speech.
W. H. Auden once said that poets should dress like businessmen. Thom Gunn preferred leather and chains.
These four poets and their recent books are representative of the poetry currently being written in Southwest England and the country more broadly.
Eight recent volumes of poetry, prose, and photography, reviewed by our editors
From her earliest work — before the idea of eco-entanglement was widely adopted by poets — Arnold viewed nature not as an ‘object’ or ‘other’ but as an inextricable (and clearly endangered) system in which humanity participates.
B O D Y interviews Scott Kiernan, a New York-based artist whose video, photo and installation works interact in ways that address their own materiality and means of distribution.
Anna Hawkins is an artist who works primarily in moving image and installation with an interest in the ways that images, gestures and language are circulated and transformed online and the impacts of technology on the intimate spheres of daily life.
Weaving together disparate references spanning across histories and geographies, German interdisciplinary artist Johanna Strobel explores the entanglement between philosophy, semiotics, and actuality.
“The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem.”
The Russian Civil War was a truly terrible event in terms of awful acts of atrocious violence, but there’s also a weird sense of farce about this, of history being played at the wrong speed.
Andrey Filimonov comes from Tomsk, the 400-year-old “Athens of Siberia” and center of White Russian resistance during the Russian Civil War.
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