Clothing, fashion, and perhaps particularly dresses, are often seen as insignificant. Arguably disregarded due to its feminine associations, any artistry is often deemed lesser than other forms of art and creation. With The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press, 2020), Emma Lee explores the female voice through various characters’ stories, taking the reader from refugee camps in Iraq to suffragettes in Britain. Whilst it is often presumed that poetry is autobiographical, perhaps Lee’s experience as a short story writer informs her desire to take on others’ voices, including those who may be voiceless in order to present the personal as political.
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REVIEW: MOONRISE BY ELLA CHAPPELL
by Lewis Buxton
Moonrise’s publisher, As Yet Untitled, is an ‘independent press that specialises in limited edition, handmade works that embrace the breadth of possibility in the book’s form’. The book is beautifully made, a fragile thing one worries about reading with a cup of tea too close. Interesting then to consider the fragility of the book’s form with the robustness of the poems. Moonrise, by Ella Chappell, is a book about sex and love and flowers and moons and stones and good nights and bad nights and scientific theories and the gravity that pulls at us all. These aren’t new themes. But that’s what I like about this book; there is at once a familiarity to it but still a newness in the words, a fresh light on the scene.Continue Reading
DEBRIS STEVENSON — PIGEON PARTY
Deborah ‘Debris’ Stevenson is founder of The Mouthy Poets, based in Nottingham, who are a collective of 50 young poets. A poet herself, with a blurb of incredible achievements, I can’t help but envy her success as someone so near my age (she’s actually younger). Watching from the outside, I can see how much she has grafted to get where she is today, and her enthusiasm for what she does shines through at workshops, performance events, and is inside every well-chosen word on the pages of the Pigeon Party (2014) collection with flipped eye publishing.
Poems are enclosed in two-part poem After The Blackstone Rangers, which sets the scene for the collection. They describe a childhood growing up in cities, where “everyone was learning”, whether rolling cigarettes, or dancing. The words are both familiar and unexpected; a place where love and friendships are based on fun that is “still disposable and warm” — referring to the “can of Scrumpy Jacks”— but also holding a wider resonance, like most of Stevenson’s work.Continue Reading
SOON EVERY HOUSE WILL HAVE ONE
I first found out about Holly Hopkins by attending a ARTNAKED Poetry Session at Library Club in London, where she cut into the awkward silence of a tightly packed room with a mixture of chatting and poetry. For some, it would have offered an opportunity to gain an insight into her work, and for those like me, it inspired a purchase of her pamphlet Soon Every House Will Have One (smith | doorstop, 2014).Continue Reading
The Norwich Radical 