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.
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.
The big one was launched at dawn. Doesn’t matter / who sent it. Soon there will be others, / enough missiles to blanket the sky. I’m with you now, / under a willow, next to a pond, a crow is perched / on a rock hunting worms.
Is this the murderer, or the wee nyaff / that kicks the hippocampus when I’m tired? / And should I yell or let it wander off, / my crisis just a detail on the ward / that nobody will log, unless I call?
Ásgeir H. Ingólfsson, an Icelandic poet who became my friend here in Prague, had a voice that carried a quiet warmth, always drawing listeners in.
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.
An old man has been blocking my view. / Get out! I shout. He shouts it back. // I open my mouth. He inspects my teeth, / ducks out of view.
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
The peddler could hardly see the path in front of him, and cursed himself for failing to buy new oil for his lantern. Twice he
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
Ray Bradbury is one of the most famous writers of the 20th century. Read about why his short story, “The Pedestrian”, is still so important
HANS, THAT HANS He has to get off at Fredericksburg Hill, right before the city of Copenhagen, a so-called freeloader on the postal
FOUR DAYS IN ILLINOIS WITH MY OLD MAN My dad got lost on the way to the airport the weekend we flew to
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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