A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: glitter on our fingers, the heaven of the moon, Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday, the buzz of numbness, and much more. Enjoy.
Chatting about beachcombing with a poet/accomplice the other week, she mentioned finding Aristotle’s lantern on an Orkney beach. I’d never heard of it – the boney, five-sided mouthpiece of a sea urchin with its fearsome, self-sharpening teeth, designed to eat through stone, which in his History of Animals Aristotle described as ‘… like a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out.’ A mouth that carries light? Light that can gnaw through stone – how would that work? […]
At age 6 our entire class had our silhouettes drawn as some sort of weird gift for our parents. It was definitely me, that black-paper other half, but a two-dimensional outline, cut from shadow and therefore expressionless and blind. This is what is left of us after consciousness has been removed, turning aside in shame. I tried to write a poem about it years later, but it had already moved beyond poetry, into significance.
John Glenday, Aristotle’s Lantern – Twenty-Four Digressions on Light
Yesterday I went to the secret woods which Nick owns/ is the custodian of, and which he shares with me and Alice Wolfe and the other people who work to protect and restore this small, injured section of land. A former tip built on ancient woodland, the site is characterised by rubble, glass, and poor, loose soils; scarred by the pits and trenches of illegal bottle diggers who show no respect to the land and have even felled its trees. We’re slowly clearing and healing it, removing rubble and glass, heavy metals and plastic, filling trenches, planting saplings. […]
And the shards. Some are so startling, or so meaningful, I bring them home. A picture of Santa! Where the pottery breaks, trees and birds, flowers, faces – even words – are taken from their usual context, liberated, perfectly framed. Most shards I place in a big bag for Alice, who transforms them into exquisite mosaics representing the wildlife who have survived, or who are now returning, to the woods. We sit together on the bench and watch the birdfeeders – crowds of coal tits feeding, a nuthatch, a tiny wren. Alice is especially pleased with the gold shards, the green, the mosaic of cracks on old white pots which she sees as the feathers of a barn owl.
But we both agree that there’s not a single shard we don’t love: how even the ubiquitous, common-as-muck Blue Willow gives itself up in infinite variations when it is broken. A manic gang of long tailed tits pay us a visit, a lone squirrel unhurriedly gathers nuts. Let that be my story for today. I am a broken thing, and I am beautiful. I am a white feather in the night, I am a leaf. I am a broken woman stroking a dog, a girl with no face, an animal, a broken King. I am a tree, a series of flowers, I’m a river.
Clare Shaw, Broken Things.
Scratching her cursive
Sarah Lada, Donna
into the soil,
she scribes a language
of talon and hunger.
Upturning stanzas,
syllables of soil
fall apart and scatter.
Our yard is raw and quiet with her.
The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That’s not some advanced meditative state: it’s the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it’s true, but it’s also normal, ordinary, regular. I don’t have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.
Dale Favier, Fetch
Dick Higgins calls this form ‘leonine verse’ in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, but I can’t find reference to it anywhere else. In fact, Wikipedia has an entry for ‘leonine verse’ that describes a totally different form. Whatever you care to call this, it looks more complicated than it is — each stanza is really a couplet, but the second and fourth (or, alternately, the first, third and fifth) metrical feet of each line in each couplet are identical, these are placed in a third line that sits between them. Effectively, the lines are woven together.
Also, if you read it across diagonally from just inside the top left corner, it goes snow, snow, snow, snow.
Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #6: Another Labyrinth
The third poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Batool Abu Akleen.
This is how I cook my grief, by Batool Abu Akleen, translated by Yasmin Zaher.
Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others.
She is the author of 48Kg. (Tenement Press, 2025), translated from the Arabic by the poet, with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher. 48Kg. is a Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Book of the Week’ / A Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Bookshelf’ choice; A New Statesman ‘Book of the Year’ 2025 / ℅ Jacqueline Rose; and was awarded the The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellowship / ℅ the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
You can read an interview between Batool Abu Akleen and Claire Armistead on the Guardian website.
Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 3: This is how I cook my grief by Batool Abu Akleen
When I was little I loved an annual. To me it was a book of delightful snippets collected together to be enjoyed in a period of time that involved a break from routine. I can picture myself reading in my pyjamas, the seemingly bottomless sweet tin, and the advent calendar that left its glitter on our fingers with all its doors open telling me that it was indeed Christmas Day. This week’s photo is like the cover of my 2025 annual.
This blog has been my way of building a good relationship with Mondays, and the fact there have been 114 episodes since September 2023 tells me that I have definitely adopted this as a habit. Singing as the Darkness Lifts (this blog’s title) comes from my love of three things: the sound of birds welcoming the dawn, the feeling of darkness lifting, the moments of joy that make my heart sing. And writing each entry is a grounding in the changing of seasons when I take time to sniff the air each Monday morning and note its scent. In some ways it is also a setting down before moving on with the new week. It is a simple place to reflect, and it is a place to find joy as the darkness lifts.
Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW
Most of my slightly mad ideas (16 days of activism last year which included 16 poetry events, January Writing Hours) have at their heart this belief that (cheesy as it sounds) community and being together, and creating space for conversations and poetry and inspiration is important. They are my acts of self-care and self preservation.
This year we decided to make all of our written content available for free, which I hope is another act of community. We are running monthly events for our paid subscribers – another much smaller type of community. And of course there is January Writing Hours, which is approaching fast.
Kim Moore, Day 16: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence
i do not want to fight myself & call it football.
Robin Gow, football tv
put my brain in a helmet & run
at the sun. instead, i want to be
something else. it is exciting that i am not sure
what else i can be. the football tv will,
like any hole, shrink from lack of use.
maybe one day be smooth & soft.
the last little man digging at the earth
in search of himself. what if that is me?
When I was seventeen, I discovered that a close friend had just broken up with another girl. Their parents had discovered they were sleeping together and, horrified, had decided to put a stop to it. My friend was devastated, and sometimes sat outside the other girl’s house in her car, crying. Amongst the many details which impressed me was that fact that they had sent each other poems. My friend told me that one of them, ‘The Good-Morrow’ by John Donne, was the most passionate love poem ever written. A while later, she gave me a copy of ‘The Good-Morrow’ along with some of Donne’s other poems. She had fallen in love with me. I was in love with a lanky indie boy pining for his previous girlfriend, and could not reciprocate. One day in the sixth-form common room I, too, passed him a copy of Donne’s poem to read.
John Donne, then, is for me intrinsically linked with all the dramas and intensities of my teenage years. As we were discovering our sexuality, my friend was pointing out the double-meaning of Donne’s ‘country pleasures’. As I gazed on my crush in tiny, grubby clubs, I was thinking: ‘For love all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere.’
Of the seven poems published in John Donne’s lifetime, only two were authorized by him, and they were instead written to be circulated in manuscript form amongst a coterie of his admirers. It seems fit that in Turton High Sixth Form in 1996 they were also circulating in handwritten form or as dog-eared photocopies; passed from lover to love-object.
Clare Pollard, Reading John Donne’s ‘The Flea’
Bridge over the Aire is a singular achievement in the same way that Briggflatts is; a poem unlike anything that Tebb’s fellow Children of Albion have, or could have, produced. As with most long poems, there are some flat moments, but overall it is a poem of great accomplishment as well as being a remarkable document of a world that has melted away before our very eyes. There is much to admire in this Collected Poems, but this poem makes it a book to treasure, a book to return to. Tebb is, above all else, a survivor of a gone world, a world of hope based on a firm sense of community and of social democracy in all its messy glory. Read it.
Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb
Last week I wrote about the pioneering doctor and scientist William Harvey, and since then I’ve been reading his wonderful second work, De generatione animalium (1653). Unpicking in crisp and patient Latin the precise mechanics of reproduction — including a great deal about how human reproduction, described in comparison with that of deer — I have found it a strangely moving read. […]
Harvey was not a poet himself, but his friend and successor, Martin Lluelyn (sometimes Llewellin, 1612-1682) was. Lluelyn, who became the doctor to King Charles II after the Restoration, wrote a prefatory poem for the English edition of De generatione, and he was probably also its unacknowledged translator. Here is his description of Harvey’s achievement in matters of the heart:
There [in the dissected animals] thy Observing Eye first found the Art
Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart:
The mystick causes of its Dark Estate,
What Pullies Close its Cells, and what Dilate.
What secret Engines tune the Pulse, whose din
By Chimes without, Strike how things fare within.
There didst thou trace the Blood, and first behold
What Dreames mistaken Sages coin’d of old.
For till thy Pegasus the fountain brake,
The crimson Blood, was but a crimson Lake.
Which first from Thee did Tyde and Motion gaine,
And Veins became its Channel, not its Chaine.
With Drake and Candish hence thy Bays is curld,
Fam’d Circulator of the Lesser World.There is a moment in the mid-late seventeenth century when the passion, complexity and rhetorical extravagance of the baroque (or ‘metaphysical’) met the precision and optimism of the new science. We see glimpses of this in late Cowley, and you could take his remarkable (and remarkably conflicted) ode to Harvey as a kind of analysis of the two elements. In Cowley, though, they never quite combine — or, perhaps rather, the combination never feels entirely natural.
Other poets, though, did see how to put it together, and Lluelyn is one of them.
Victoria Moul, The running of the deer: celebrating Christmas in 1644
The latest from Vancouver-based writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt, a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, is the poetry collection The Idea of An Entire Life (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025). “How we exist in the world / depends on how we describe it.” begins the opening poem in the collection, “AUTOFICTION.” The poems in this collection are quietly gestural, earth-shaking, precise and performative, offering a layering of direct statements, narrative storytelling and subtle truths. “Picture the women waiting at the forest’s centre,” Belcourt writes, as part of the poem “20TH-CENTURY CREE HISTORY,” “their hands / folded into little coffins. // Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.”
I seem to be a few books behind on Belcourt, having missed A Minor Chorus: A Novel (Toronto ON: Hamish Hamilton, 2022) and Coexistence: Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), the two most recent of his growing list of titles that includes the full-length poetry debut, This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), a book that made him the youngest winner-to-date of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], as well as his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020) [see my review of such here]. There is a way that Belcourt has of stitching together the present moment with threads of memory and history, writing declarative details of and around Queer identity, family history and survival, utilizing factual details as building blocks into something larger, deeper. As any poem might require, in that particular moment. “I want to call attention to the dead,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CRUISING UTOPIA SONNETS,” “to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world.” There is a dream-like quality to elements of these poems, blended with concrete realities, each side complementing the other in quite striking ways, hitting all the right notes of lovely, of devastating, of loss and heartbreak and wonder. These are poems of witness, of memory; of documentation; a book of the whole world, the whole body, an approach that seems to be how he approaches the books of his I’ve seen to date, including elements of his entire world in that particular moment into the work. This is, arguably, what the best work is supposed to, each poem and line offering a different facet, a different fragment, of something far larger and more expansive as a unified whole. A book of an entire life, indeed.
rob mclennan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Idea of An Entire Life
I was spelunking some digital archives recently and came across Bob Hicok’s “A Primer,” which I loved to bring into classes at assorted Michigan universities. Apart from Frost, excepted for his titular role in this publication, I’ve been trying to not repeat poets, but in the days that followed my rediscovery I couldn’t stop laughing whenever I thought “I live now / in Virginia, which has no backup plan,” and so it occurred to me that perhaps my dumb little rules are less important than, well, enjoying life.
What’s to love? The ability of a poem to have an entire room of twenty-something-year-olds in stitches is a ringing endorsement in my book, though my book is titled Make Poetry for People Again and yours may well have a smarter title, like Something Nice I Saw Today. With Michigan in literal eyesight just a five-minute stroll from the desk where I am writing, I find the seasonal hyperboles are pleasingly apt. As much as I dislike small talk—try asking me some time “What’s new?” and enjoy the cold sweat it engenders—I consider weather a topic of extreme importance, an enthusiasm partially born of the perpetual endurance sports–based need to know when it might next be kind of warm outside, but mostly of the simple fact that what comes from above comes for each of us in kind. It’s always our weather.
Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok
In the heaven of the moon, Dante meets the humblest of the blest. When Dante asks one of them – Piccarda Donati – if souls like her desire a ‘higher place / to see more and to be yet more beloved’,
…She and the other shades first smiled a little –
and then she answered me with so much joy
she seemed ablaze with the first fire of love:She explains that it is impossible for them or any of the saved to desire more than they have because that would be discordant with the will of God:
….And in his will is found our peace: it is
that sea to which all beings move that are
by it created or by nature made.This last tercet is often quoted, whether in Dante’s Italian or in different translations. What quiet power there is in the simple phrases, both in terms of their psychological and metaphysical meanings. What I find most stunning, though, is the imaginative reach that unites these vast ideas to the delicate humanity of ‘She and the other shades first smiled a little’. Love in the most absolute sense, the creative love of God, is brought together with the simple human joys of shared knowledge, shared feeling, and the ability to communicate these things, so that we feel how such emotions in this world offer glimpses of the divine. […]
I’m no Dante scholar and can’t judge [D. M.] Black’s version on purely scholarly grounds but I have enjoyed the Paradiso in several different translations, and wrestled with it in Italian. Black’s version is the one that’s given me the most intense imaginative experience and sheer reading pleasure. This is because he writes as a poet translating a poem into poetry for a wide readership, less concerned with word for word accuracy than an academic Dantist needs to be.
Edmund Prestwich, Dante’s Paradiso, translated by D. M. Black
From the first word of the comprehensive new Poems of Seamus Heaney, Heaney writes in a familiar voice.
Hushed
And lulled
Lay the field, under a high-sky sun.Hushed and lulled could have been the title of this volume. Heaney’s voice often is hushed and lulled, both his writing and his reading voice. There is much “hushed and lulled” imagery in Death of a Naturalist: “The squat pen rests, snug as a gun”, “Hunched over the railing”, “Snug on our bellies”, “Drifted through the dark of banks and hatches”. This hushed hunching is found in the earliest uncollected poems, but also in some of Heaney’s later work, such as Seeing Things: “Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb”, “that sniffed-at, bleated-into grassy space”, “Firelit, shuttered, slated, and stone-walled”, “claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof/Effect”, “all hutch and hatch”.
This hutch-hatch snug-nested manner is the heart of Heaney’s forms as well as his tones. Like the poet who had the greatest-but-least-acknowledged influence on his work, Robert Frost, Heaney enjoys tightness—not the neat tightness of form in which Frost specialized, but the sort of tightness we associate with being hushed, slated, lulled, or stone-walled: his poems are packed, slotted, with meanings couching, crouching, bunching.
Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.
The poem’s speaker moves from victim to survivor. The sequence “Surviving” uses animals as metaphor, in part iii, “Isolation: Giant squid”,
“I shared my body with the swelling sea,
flowing in freedom, salty and edgeless.
We cephalopods have been shapeshifting
in these depths for five hundred million years,
to the rhythm of our three hearts pulsing.”Letting go of the abuse and shifting into a shape that feels like home, enabled the speaker to adapt to life free from that abuse. It’s also a place from which the speaker is able to consider the abuser, in “Faceless”, “He was a needle, not sewing to join anything together/ but because he enjoyed the holes that were left behind”. The journey continues, an abecedarian in “A-Z gratitude list”, has some seemingly random items, “G is for gusting wind”, “River’s brown windows”, “S is for shingle”, until “Zips. Keeping a child warm/ by closing metal teeth with my fumbling fingers.”
Emma Lee, “Full Body Reclaim” Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.
This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.
I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.
Matthew Paul, Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other
My pamphlet Cry (Valley Press, 2025) is all at once a delving into the ego, a rumination on the difficulties of accepting one’s suddenly-changed identity as a creative mother, and a heartfelt expression of love for one’s child. The subjective viewpoint is that of a woman who tries to carve out time to maintain her ‘writer self’ alongside the newly acquired ‘mother self’, and she wends her way between the mundanity of chores and the space needed in order to write. The poems veer from warm love for her child to frustration to exhaustion to annoyance at a husband who doesn’t consider the mundane aspects of parenting to be part of his role. Freedom and space are craved.
The poem ‘Floating’ appears almost half-way through the collection, just before the central crux, and I have chosen to offer it here for all its metaphor, psychology and symbolism. As a poet, I find it hard to escape the metaphor; indeed some things are better said through it. It lends an “otherness” which can encourage a freer voice, more immediate language, and something concrete on which to base an idea or feeling. For otherness, think of the patient’s chair facing away from the antiquated psychoanalyst to garner honesty and openness, or likening a person or feeling to a piece of fruit to detach them from yourself and describe them better: hard skin, pith, juice… One can really have fun. In ‘Floating’ I give you water.
Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)
I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.
All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.
Ann E. Michael, Systems
We watch other writers making best seller lists, winning awards and feel like we could have had that if only we’d set up an instagram account and promoted our books, or made lots and lots of contacts that we could pull in for favours when we needed them, if we’d set the alarm for five am and pushed out 2000 words fuelled by caffeine before shuffling the kids to school and keeping house, not forgetting making time for health and happiness, reconnecting with nature and reading fifty two books a year. We have this pushed at us from every corner of the internet. The dream writer life can be achieved if you do more than other writers. If you fight harder you will achieve more. If you push harder you will be the one that makes it. Added to this, we crave the validation of our peers, naturally, and as a species we are drawn to the idea of a hierarchy, that there must be a way to attain the top tier if not the top position. If we knew what the key to it all was, we could make it. If we took the right course, the right workshop, if we made the right friends we would, finally reach the golden summit of being successful. There are many people making money selling writers a key to success that doesn’t really exist. If you can’t physically fight, will you drown? If you can’t keep up, will you disappear? This is one of the fears that comes up the most when I am mentoring. I have that fear in me too. But our perceptions of what the writer life looks like, and about success are skewed by that fear.
Wendy Pratt, I don’t recognize the writing road anymore, or even the creative landscape my mind is waking up to.
What a lovely event it was at The Brunswick in Hove on Sunday, at the awards event for the Brighton & Hove Arts Council Poetry Competition. Jeremy Page had kindly invited me to read alongside him (he was the adjudicator) and the audience was very receptive, especially given that they were no doubt there to hear the results of the comp! One of the poems I read was ‘She offers her defence’ from The Mayday Diaries, not one I’ve ever included in a reading because it’s written in two voices and without having the poem in front of you it’s possibly a bit hard to follow. Then I had the idea of asking poet friend Jill Fricker to read it with me. I knew she would be there as she had been shortlisted for the prize. And I think our team reading went well!
Come the second half, when the results were announced we found out Jill won first prize for her poem ‘NW3’ – very exciting, and a massive co-incidence that she’d already appeared on stage in the first half. Huge congratulations to Jill. She’s actually a pretty successful poetry comper. I must ask her what the secret is.
This week I was contacted by Rebecca Leek, whose podcast The Ditty Bag is a lovely thing: she records a new episode every week, featuring five or six poems that she has chosen, sometimes on a theme. This week there’s a fair bit of water, and Rebecca included my poem ‘Before the Splicing’ which was originally published in Prole magazine. She liked the poem because of its rope-making and boat-ish references, and actually explained what ‘splicing’ is. Very helpful! The poem is a sonnet spoken by a woman having doubts (or not) ostensibly about whether the rope she’s working on will hold tight, but also whether her impending marriage will work (the sense of ‘getting spliced’). I was delighted to hear Rebecca read it.
Robin Houghton, Readings, and a poem on ‘The Ditty Bag’ podcast
I live in a world of books, in the over-passionate, underfunded world of the arts. It’s messy and uncomfortable. But art is. The billionaires are in tech in the Bay Area. While thriving financially in the artistic sphere may be near impossible, reading enriches my life in every other area: it allows me to expand my mind, travel the world, imagine myself anew, be everywhere all at once.
As a publisher, I always think about who will read the books we publish. As a reader, I read all over the place, tumbling through genres, styles, poems, stories. I like to envision that we will all keep engaging with literature, whether we read books physically, listen to audiobooks, or consume bite-sized essays and poems throughout the day.
Kate Gale, Read to Me, America: For The Love of the Arts
Many poets seem to leave their book behind as soon as it’s published, but at that point I feel I’m only just getting to know it.
First of all, the reviews it receives (if the poet’s lucky!), provide an excellent sounding board. Which poems do reviewers highlight? What elements are cast into doubt? And secondly, what about the readers who buy the collection? These days, they often select a favourite poem or two from the book and post them on social media. Which ones are chosen? And thirdly, the poems that the poet might also decide to share. Which generate most traction? Which are most popular? Which garner most sales of the book? And then there are in-person readings. As mentioned previously on here, those events enable the poet to explore their collection again, to test which poems go down best in person, and which appear to disappoint.
Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection
And finally, the poet often benefits from time to weigh up all this feedback, to gauge it, to avoid dramatic, knee-jerk reactions to it, to compare and contrast it, to consider how it might (or might not!) contribute to the writing of their next collection. Of course, none of this process is possible if they turn their back on the book and immediately embark on another creative project as soon as a copy reaches their hands. The seemingly fallow period that follows publication is, in my view, a necessary pause, a pause that may be filled by the satisfaction of engaging with readers.
My poetry book now lives in over 120 homes, across 28 states and 5 countries. I want to say these numbers are far beyond what I expected, but I don’t think I really let myself “expect” anything. Regardless, every time I try to picture it—these little blue books sitting on nightstands, tucked into bags, resting on coffee tables—my whole body hums. […]
I’ve learned that marketing is much less fun than writing, and I’m not really the type who can do both at once. So for now, I’m letting myself lean into sharing this book and finding my readers.
Originally, I planned to spend a few quiet months focused on online sales before moving toward in-person stores. I wanted room to breathe after the marathon of finalizing the book. But my ADHD brain saw shiny opportunities and sprinted straight to them. I ended up pitching shops almost immediately.
From everything I’d read, I expected a long string of no’s before even one yes. Instead, I got two early yes’s (woohoo!), followed by two no’s, and two that I have not heard back from yet. Of the six places I pitched, half were boutiques and half were indie bookstores. And incredibly, A History of Holding is now available at Golden Hour Goods in Ventura and The Bookworm in Camarillo.
I’ve already sold a few copies at Golden Hour Goods (in fact, the first copy sold before I’d even left the shop)! The idea that a stranger could wander in, pick up my book, and decide to bring it home? That still feels unreal. […]
Another surprise was just how time-consuming and expensive it was to sign and ship orders. Each packaged book included a custom sticker, bookmark, plastic envelope to protect the book, gold wax seal, bubble polymailer, and shipping labels. By the time all was said and done, I spent about $7 on materials and postage per book. Still totally worth it, in my opinion. There are cheaper options, of course (ahem, Amazon), but I loved sending out the highest-quality book, infused with special touches directly from me. I wanted opening my book to be the highlight of someone’s day.
Allison Mei-Li, My First Month as a Published Author
The early half of this week has been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on CLOVEN, whose release is pending just after the beginning of the year. The initial proof copy was lost in the mail or swiped from the package room (or has somehow vanished into a dimensional divide along with a bottle of nail polish and some air fresheners) so I had to order another. Given shipping times, I assumed [that] would set me back a few weeks on the release, but I there wasn’t much that needed adjusting besides some margin/gutter issues, so I was able to make those changes in the master file, get it approved by the printer, and place an order for my first stack, which given it’s the 10th, may guarantee me copies before Christmas. It feels like a more wintry book than GRANATA, which was all spring/summer, the first book in the series, so this mid-winter debut seems perfect. […]
I was thinking the other day, when I had to order another stack of an older self-issued volume, DARK COUNTRY, how much releasing my own work has changed my view of what’s possible for so much the better. On one hand, the benefits are immediate, like control over timelines and the book’s launch into the world. It also feels good and more sure-footed to not be waiting on submissions and schedules and just feeling like there are blocks and bottlenecks that are ultimately a zero sum game, at least for me and my needs/wants. If I could go back a couple decades, as enjoyable as its been to work with other publishers, I’d switch to self-publishing much faster than I did (for zines and chaps, I’ve been doing it all along through the years, but I’ve only had the design/layout skills in the past half-decade or so. )
Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch
I am excited to say that I have just received advance copies of Polar Corona, my prize-winning ‘crown-of-sonnets’ poetry pamphlet, published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press.
For further details: click here.
From the blurbs:
“In Polar Corona, Caroline Gill offers a vivid and precise depiction of Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife, especially the seasonal rhythms of penguins’ lives, interwoven with a poignant exploration of human fortitude in this most testing of environments. Her marvellous ear for the music of a poem is evident throughout and the intricate pattern of mostly half rhymes cleverly accentuates the pervading sense of risk and unpredictability.”
– Susan Richardson, Author of Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022) and Words the Turtle Taught Me (Cinnamon Press, 2018), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award
Caroline Gill, ‘Polar Corona’, my prize-winning poetry pamphlet on Antarctica
Are you surprised to see me so soon?—me too! I’m usually more of your every-so-often friend who arrives with poems and snacks, but I just got the word I could officially share this with you (and I wanted to share here FIRST before you saw it on social media, etc.—Accidental Devotions has its FINAL cover—and I’m trying (um, failing) to act casual about it.
But the day is perfect to share as today would have been Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday and Emily D. is braided all through this next book (her and Darling Sue and even pressed jasmine)! So maybe this is not just a cover reveal, but also a little birthday offering to Emily’s altar of em dashes and devotion. (Side note: I recently read that AI is using dashes now, and I wanted to shout—Grrrrl, I got here first! I know there are a lot of dash-happy poets out there—maybe we need to start an Em Dash Society or at least wear t-shirts: The Em Dash: Because Periods Are Too Final).
Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty
My Creative Retirement Institute class on Emily Dickinson’s fascicles wrapped up yesterday. The beauty (and the weirdness) of it was that focusing on the fascicles made it impossible for me to turn the class into “all of Bethany’s favorite E. D. poems.” In each class I asked, “What caught your eye? What do you want to bring to our attention?” As a result, we put a microscope to poems I’ve barely given a glance in the past. And everything we picked up gave us so much to talk about. It was ideal.
Today I’m having my writing group here, at my house. I’ll bake Emily’s Coconut Cake, and we’ll drink sparkling water, and read poems to one another. What could be better?
Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!
Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.
It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.
I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:
If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.
If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.
Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.
Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…
I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close. There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press. At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019. I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include. I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new. I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.
But this morning, I have a different vision. I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly. I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground. The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems. I’m going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems. I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.
I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication. So I want it to be good work on several levels: the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December
Perhaps it is my southern hemisphere background, but I find it hard not to feel gloomy in the cold, dark, dreary months of northern winter.
This December has been particularly depressing. In the part of southeast England where I live, issues with mains water quality led to a disruption in supply; ironically, given the fact that it has been raining for weeks. The lines from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner acquired a new context:
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.There have also been reports of an alarming surge in flu cases, including advice to wear face masks in public settings. On a global scale, events seem to be increasingly turbulent, the background noise more dissonant, the outlook ever more chaotic and uncertain. In some ways it feels reminiscent of the pandemic: that sense, in early 2020, of flailing around, panic-stricken and directionless. Then there was the alien state of being in lockdown; schools, businesses, leisure facilities all closed, no physical contact with wider family or friends, daily announcements of grim statistics and ever more stringent protocols….
That was nearly five years ago, and it feels like another lifetime. We don’t talk much about that period of lockdown any more, yet the repercussions continue to reverberate in deep and subtle ways. It features, directly or indirectly, in a number of my poems: ‘Post Lockdown’, for example, which was written in 2021, or, more recently, ‘Discontinuity’.
May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.
Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times
the world is sky, lake, three men and a killing. it is winter.
deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.
veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.
Grant Hackett [no title]
I must admit, these short, dark days are hard to take. Being more of a night owl, I miss part of the limited daylight we get in the mornings, then feel shocked and cheated when twilight approaches before 5 p.m. So unfair!
How to cope? I try to appreciate merino wool sweaters, flannel sheets, and our wood-burning stove. And ignore the fact that spring is still months away—in fact, it’s not even officially winter yet! Still, it’s cold, dark and damp, and I struggle.
otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstreamBut it turns out that the worst is already behind us: yesterday saw the earliest sunset of the year here, at 4:48 p.m. From today on, the days will feel longer even though the winter solstice is not until December 21. So hurray for the return of the light!
Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark
It’s cold in these darkest days of winter, the land having turned its face away from the sun. But you are warm here, sleeping heavily under your down quilt, your worries scattered lifelessly about the rug where your mind dropped them. In your dream, you are following a white fox who trots through the frozen forest, leading you further and further away from the safety of your cabin. Where is he taking you? The way he darts between the trees, his thick fur lit only by the moon, makes him disappear for whole minutes. Many times you think you’ve lost him and begin to panic, only to glimpse the soft plume of his tail leading always just ahead. And now, what is that singing in the distance?
A sound dissolves one dream into another as candlelight fills your bedroom. It’s the children who are singing so beautifully. Do you know them? Yes, they are the same ones who, during the day, bicker over toys and leave clumps of porridge on the table, but are now revealed as children of light. Leading them is a woman wearing a crown of fire and carrying a tray of coffee and yellow buns. The smell of saffron is the smell of the sun. She invites you to taste it.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light
I am sheltered on the second floor,
the house, when lit, is a fishbowl.
Helicopters never quit whirling over Providence.
They clip the air, giant locust wings, clip
and clip and clip, over gardens, greens,
sewers; when they quit, the silence of grief.In and out of the buzz of numbness.
Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number
We live it viscerally but our experience,
not yet cold, is already cliché.
I wrote to my community this morning about the horrific shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island yesterday, and the horrific shooting at the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney today. Over the last several years I suspect every rabbi I know has gotten better at finding words to say after unthinkable tragedy. A skill none of us wanted. […]
When life feels dark and overwhelming, Jewish tradition teaches us to come together and to let our light shine. Over the course of the coming week our literal flames will go from one tiny candle to the blazing brilliance of a chanukiyah full of light. When we come together, the lights of our souls become more than the sum of their parts. The best response I know to anti-Jewish hatred, or any hatred, is to bravely let our light shine.
That’s the best wisdom I have to share today. For those who about to be celebrating (or are already celebrating — hi antipodeans!), may this Festival of Lights be a time of joy even amidst this sorrow.
Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now
We have names for our dark forces.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds
We have names for things close to us.
Different names when they become distant.
We have names for our separations.
And names for the shadows that grow
when the moon rejects us.
I hold this evening up
against that incomprehensible design.
A cold front has crept down from the north.
Clouds obscure everything, even reason.
Even the light from Cassiopeia
that has been stubbornly travelling in my direction
for thousands of years.
It seems like a good time of year to remember the goal of Christianity used to be “peace on earth, good will towards humanity” and “love thy neighbor” and you know, welcoming the stranger and the immigrant because after all, Jesus was born in a foreign land and no one gave his family shelter—all that stuff that seems to have fallen out of fashion among too many who call themselves Christian. Whew! All right, maybe this post got heavy. I also lost another poet friend, the great Connie Walle, who was a fixture in the Tacoma poetry scene and a great poet besides. It made me sad I had not expressed my admiration to her more while she was still here—a theme of this year for me, as I cross the names of old friends off the holiday card list because they are no longer with us. We really do a bad job of this remembering to express thanks, love, and appreciation for those friends and family, writers and artists, who have made our lives better, our memories short, our ability to remind ourselves that even our lives are not “forever,” and even small things cannot be taken for granted.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dangerous Floods All Around, Trying to Holiday Despite
Brown eyes peer through a back seat window, gazing at the sparkling white powder on the city sidewalks. A small mittened hand swipes a red runny nose then dips quickly back into the pocket of the threadbare rumpled jacket from which it emerged. Festive shoppers with bulging bags walk gaily down the street as brown eyes watch in wonder. The family in the old red Chevy sits in the background of busy streets and merry anticipation, waiting at a red light as the sputtering heater blows hot then cold and the children sniffle and cough the carol of the hungry and homeless. Down the snowy street it chugs, straining on its last fumes to reach the red door of the shelter where warmth and food and one cold night off the streets awaits if the line isn’t too long or the shelter too full. Belief is a word pregnant with hope.
Charlotte Hamrick, Red
Some leave, some arrive.
Flaggers waving lit-up wands
before the train station.*
For a few moments,
Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December
the silhouettes of trees pressed
against the sky’s burning throat.
Welcome to the Some Flowers Soon Christmas Poetry Quiz! Questions this week, answers next Monday. Then I’ll be away for a fortnight and back in the New Year.
All the answers, except the last one, are the names of modern poets. The usual rules apply: strictly no Googling, but you may consult poems learned by heart. Previous editions of Some Flowers Soon may also, in some cases, be helpful. […]
Which Swiss-Bolivian poet, who died this year, wrote a poem (in English) which begins:
snow is english
snow is international
snow is secret
snow is small
snow is literary
snow is translatable[…]
Which poet wrote a “Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan” which ends:
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Some Flowers Soon Christmas Quiz 2025Christmas is the time of cold air
and loud parties and big expense,
but in our hearts flames flicker
answeringly, as on old-fashioned
trees. I would rather the house
burn down than our flames go out.
Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation…
… for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia … and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC!
It’s the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened my birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply to my day: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday to me in that moment. I’d planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. “But I please to know what my presents are now!” I thought, so I damn well opened my presents over breakfast, and I’m so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.
I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing.
Liz Lefroy, I “Do What [I] Damn Well Please”
All that I am
John Siddique, A Wintery Poem
is the question of
a crow against the sky
on a cold morning
when it is too bright
to see,
too blue and white
to believe.
The tree against
the landscape. One thing
depending on the other.