Books in Brief: New Writing from Scotland
June 26, 2025
B O D Y reviews new pamphlets by David Kinloch, James Appleby, and Sophie Cooke.
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B O D Y reviews new pamphlets by David Kinloch, James Appleby, and Sophie Cooke.
Stephan Delbos on the poetry of Tim Dlugos and Danzez Smith, two poets whose poetry clarifies the evolving relationship between American society & AIDS and shows how poetry can follow truth through taboo.
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.
I have never had a particularly good imagination. Really, it’s kind of dire. It irritates my wife that I can’t imagine a future. I’m not sure how much of that is aphantasia and how much of that is growing up with an imminent Rapture …
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.
The fire on the American mountainside was dying down. My thought was that horror cannot be cheated if hope is to become believable.
There must be thousands of us non-Southerners with similar secret histories, people who profited from the crime of slavery and continue to do so.
Because he wanted all the attention at the funeral, all the condolences, all the pity. The big man in sorrow. Jakob weeping.
We’ve been lucky enough to publish many, many brilliant, original, and moving pieces — and there are several amongst them that could easily be included within this list. But these pieces here, these are five that, for whatever reasons, have stayed with me.
If there is a common denominator among the translated fiction published in B O D Y, it is work that maintains a precarious yet exhilarating balance between wild flights of imagination, unbridled humor and grappling with an often harsh reality. Read my favorites here.
Publishing writing you love is the greatest pleasure of editing a literary journal. It’s hard to believe B O D Y has been around for 10 years and I’m astounded by the quality and variety of writing in our archives. Herewith some of my favorites.
It has been an enormous privilege to edit this magazine and I’m astounded by the sheer volume of great writing we’ve been entrusted with over the past ten years. The poems, stories, and essays in this selection represent, to me, what this project has really been about since the beginning: discovering great new writing.
B O D Y, through its ties with translators, has always given space to intriguing voices from the past. When selecting my favourites on the occasion of the magazine’s ten-year anniversary, it seemed fitting to highlight three deceased poets – a Hungarian, Czech, and Russian – that deserve more attention.
These poems explore the changes wrought by flight as in fleeing from, forced travel, emigration, leaving with no guarantee you will return, sometimes knowing you won’t.
I was the last place on the planet / where astronauts slept / my last customers were the planet’s / last people
My Seven Lives tells a story of 20th century Central Europe through the voice of Slovak journalist Agneša Kalinová.
Dream of a Journey: Selected Poems, brings to readers of English the first full-length volume of poems by Czech poet Kateřina Rudčenková.
They are women who want to look into the mirror and be satisfied with their reflection. Envy is born when you look into the mirror and don’t like what you see there. Everything about this sin begins with the eyes.
Herewith a fresh selection of our favorite recent poetry, fiction, and biography in translation from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, and Italian.
A girl boarded the train. Actually, she was no longer a girl, because she was about thirty. But there was something in her behaviour and her appearance which suggested that, body aside, she was still a girl.
B O D Y Editors recommend a handful of recently-published books they admire and think you should read.
The rich tradition of communing with the dead through poetry stretches back from the magic and metaphysics of Lucie Brock-Boido to James Merrill at the
Halloween night, 1963. John Berryman is reading with Robert Lowell at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. This is the first time Berryman has
Andrew J. Moorhouse of Fine Press Poetry talks about what brought him to the life-changing decision to establish the press.
Every poem in the collection has, somewhere in the collection, another poem which is its opposite.
You either believe Kent Johnson exists or he doesn’t. Neither is true. In his poems, translations, conceptual acts anchored on the page, Kent Johnson is there and not there.
“There is little financial reward in publishing poetry but a great deal of satisfaction” – Rob A. Mackenzie on the origins and history of Blue Diode Press
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 today.
Mark Terrill’s charming, masterful, workaday, transcendental lyric poetry is more compelling than ever
This Marinetti on his second and final trip to Russia was less like one of the early figures of punk than a bloated 70s rock dinosaur living on past glory and greed. Instead of cocaine he had fascism, and just like the rock megastars with their producers and managers he had the backing of a bald, fat megalomaniac.
You read a book about a serial killer expecting to feel terror when he raises his gun or knife but here it comes in bursts of hard-earned self-insight: “I fantasized about being a person, which I never was in real life.”
Waking in the middle of the night, I down a glass of water then plod off to pee, which seems funny enough to laugh about,
Ernest Hilbert’s latest collection, Last One Out, addresses not only our individual mortality, but a kind of “last call” for the world as we know it.
On December 13, 1963, approximately three weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, the twenty-two-year-old folksinger Bob Dylan received the
I don’t want to put him on the spot / and I know I’d think less of him / if he gave the wrong answer. Instead, / I name names in my head, a long list / of friends who would have let me die.
Maybe We’re Leaving By Jan Balabán Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski Glagoslav Publications 2018, 164 pp Ray Bradbury’s Machineries of Joy (1964) includes a
APPARITIONS I. Once upon a time, there was a woman who lost her son. She sent him off, in the care of some men
The bus stopped, I think, and people poured out, / baffled by their heavy hearts, / and not one of them, not one / thought of the kite.
I went out to my mailbox. / Everything was addressed to a previous / occupant (twice removed) / who is now, / according to my neighbors / deceased.
Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak By Elizabeth Knapp Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2019, 73 pages Reviewed by Francesca Bell ELIZABETH KNAPP’s
The Night Circus and Other Stories Short stories by Uršula Kovalyk Translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood Parthian Books When I first
And My Head Exploded Selected and translated by Geoffrey Chew Jantar Publishing 2018, 200 pp And My Head Exploded: Tales of Desire,
Christopher Fahey Nurtured Forms November 9 to December 7 Java Project Greenpoint, Brooklyn Nature and nurture, nebulous forces that shape us. Christopher Fahey’s biomorphic sculptures
SEX AND THE HOLOCAUST I’ve been masturbating for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it seems that I came out of the womb
Of course, we miss somebody. We always wish somebody was here. But when somebody is not here, we have a little freedom to do as we please.
Fiends Fell by Tom Pickard Flood Editions, 2017 224 pages Reviewed by Joshua Weiner Tom Pickard’s reputation as a poet of the
Prose Poetry and the City by Donna Stonecipher Parlor Press, 2017 182 pages Reviewed by Kate Singer I once asked Donna Stonecipher
to stare for too long into the empty china cups of your eyes / is more dangerous than a scorpion’s caress / but you are my sister and the flag of your bra signals incest and night
LIFE INUNDATING ART: KNAUSGÅRD BRINGS HIS LENGHTY STRUGGLE TO AN END WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, so the famous edict goes. And read?
Is it possible to thrive while sick? To live large not in spite of one’s illness but because of it? Japanese artist Kusama Yayoi voluntarily
Concert at a Railway Station: Selected Poems By Osip Mandelstam Translated by Alistair Noon Shearsman Books 142 pages Born in 1891, Osip Mandelstam is
It’s like a shadow on your bedroom wall— / you never think it’ll reach to grab your throat / until you stand just right before the night- / light and it does—
GERMANS There are eleven of them. Why I remember the exact number is uncertain, perhaps because it’s enough to field a football team. They arrive
EXPECTANCY He places a pillow across my lap,then let’s loose a joke about saving dignity.He wants to check my scar, and the whole teamdescends from
PRAGUE AND MEMORY Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in a three-part series of a new work by American poet and critic
PRAGUE AND MEMORY, 2018 Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series of a new work by American poet and
Thin Rising Vapors By Seth Rogoff Sagging Meniscus Press, 2018 240 pages We don’t read our friends’ personal diaries or emails not so much
PRAGUE AND MEMORY Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a three-part series of a new work by American poet and critic
Insistence By Ailbhe Darcy Bloodaxe Books, 2018 80 pages “But I’m not sure we’ll ever say the world is ours again, not sure we’ll
I remember a day in Houston, in the death / throes of summer, a young man nailing / a live swan to a tree in the posture / of the Christ in an argument with beauty.
DONALD HALL was an inveterate New Englander. This is one casual secret of everything he wrote, from his poetry to his books about poetry,
I know her / by the way she faces the world / straight–backed and solid, / one branch holding itself / a little higher.
The Only Story By Julian Barnes Penguin, 2018 272 pages Julian Barnes is the kind of writer who composes the same book again and
HARD WAX I pull into the Elizabeth Wende Breast Care facility in Brighton, shut off my car and walk in the doors. This
QUAD by Alistair Noon Longbarrow Press 2017, 20 pages I can’t help but associate Alistair Noon’s title Quad with Samuel Beckett’s late television play
Red: The History of a Color By Michel Pastoureau Translated from the French by Jody Gladding Princeton University Press 216 pages When Ian MacKaye
The Blind Man Marcel Duchamp & Beatrice Wood & Henri-Pierre Roché Edited by Sophie Seita Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017 “We had lost confidence
Falling Awake By Alice Oswald Cape Poetry 2016, 96 pp Alice Oswald, one of Britain’s most celebrated poets and an eminent contributor to the
Advice from the Lights By Stephen Burt Graywolf Press 2017, 96 pp In his book Infidel Poetics (2009), Daniel Tiffany praises the obscurity of
Concerto al-Quds By Adonis Translated by Khaled Mattawa Yale University Press 96 pages When Donald Trump recently and controversially announced that the United States
Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time Edited by Gennady Barabtarlo Princeton University Press, 2017 224 pages In 1964 Vladimir Nabokov undertook an experiment to test
It races, / carrying eleven meetings, / a lady’s purse, / a separation’s grief, / seven briefcases, / eight belated greetings, / and a beetle / on a jacket’s sleeve.
Elizabeth Bishop and Translation By Mariana Machová Lexington Books 2016, 182 pp “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined
CLEARING THE THROAT I used to cox. Hours on the water calling cadence and strokes. Guiding the boat’s body, guiding the rudder, guiding
The Temple She Became By Rachel Custer Five Oaks Press 2017, 86 pp I first became interested in Rachel Custer’s poetry last October when
Would it be possible to take a poem by Richard Wilbur, adjust its spelling and some of its references and insert it unobtrusively in
B O D Y is proud to present our nominees for the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. POETRY: Michael Collier for Meadow
TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE the Czech poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek published a poem that was uncharacteristic in two respects. Its last
Ever read The Lord of the Rings? I knew it! You look like a reader, you have that kind of face. … So alright, then, listen to my story all the way through, and you’ll catch on. You’ll understand that I couldn’t have done any different.
Update: Poems 2011-2012 By Dennis O’Driscoll Anvil Press Poetry 2014, 64 pp Death never seemed to stray far from the attention of Irish poet-critic
The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them By Stephen Burt Harvard University Press 2016, 432 pp Stephen Burt’s
Into the Spotlight An anthology of Slovak fiction Translated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek and Julia Sherwood Published by Three String Books
I’m ashamed to admit I had acted under the pressure of circumstance, and the whole thing happened purely by chance. I’d much prefer to think it had all been predestined a long time ago, because inevitability is a great excuse for actions even more cruel than those I’m about to describe.
I DIDN’T KNOW the late Bill Knott very well. By the time I arrived in Boston in 1987, Bill was firmly ensconced by his
In my village, I’m the fool. / Sad dogs know me – sad white school / of sleepy dogs that drift away /
into the distance.
Geis By Caitríona O’Reilly Bloodaxe Books 2015, 64 pp Caitríona O’Reilly’s intriguingly obscure poems offer peeks into the unspoken and wilfully ignored aspects of
I got home late once, tired, / and sat down by his bedside. / You must be hungry, he said. / A magnificent sentence like that, / the last I remember him saying.
Outer Space: Selected Poems By Cathal McCabe Metre Editions 2016, 144 pages It is not common to see a poet’s debut appended with the
The following essay is an excerpt from Joshua Weiner’s Berlin Notebook (available on Amazon) out now from the Los Angeles Review of Books _______________________________________________________________________
It was the great Russian thinker, Alexander Herzen, who railed against the power of abstractions, of any of the isms in our lives, to
Sounds Familiar or The Beast of Artek (A Gothic Novel) By Zinovy Zinik Divus 245 pages Zinovy Zinik’s Sounds Familiar or The Beast of
If one should take one lesson from the novels of James Salter, it should be his emphasis on savoir vivre. Salter’s novels, A Sport
The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish By Joshua Weiner The University of Chicago Press 2013, 68 pages The promise of a
Nick Demske – Nick Demske Fence Books, 2010 88 pages Reading Nick Demske’s poems in B O D Y this week brought me back
Night Sky with Exit Wounds By Ocean Vuong Copper Canyon Press 89 pages Occasionally there is a book so exquisitely realized that a reviewer
Story Book By Douglas Piccinnini The Cultural Society 122 pages When confronted for the first time with the genre of “prose poetry,” any kindergarten
The Selected Poetry of Emilio Villa Translated by Dominic Siracusa Contra Mundum Press 708 pages Who are the greatest Italian poets? Ask the
By Robert Archambeau If one were to shout the question “who is a literary genius?” in the general direction of a gaggle of young
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