TS Eliot was wrong: May is the cruellest month. It took Kathryn Bevis away. She was a beautiful human, a gifted poet and a close friend, and I don’t yet have the words for her loss. A week ago, I took the decision to go on compassionate leave. Grief is exhausting, and so is the life of a freelance poet.

NB: This essay was originally commissioned and published by The Dark Horse for its Autumn/Winter edition in 2020. I republish it here to complement my contribution to the recently published The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Frontline of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights. (London: Constable, 2024)

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that needs to take a little trip - thankfully a rare occurrence - to Corrections Corner. I appreciated the response to last week’s newsletter on the Ressence ‘catalogue raisonné’ but as several people pointed out (among them, awkwardly enough, people who had worked on it directly) a…

THE WHO: The Poetry Edit is a weekly poetry newsletter promoting proper recompense for poets and creating opportunities within the poetry industry. The Poetry’s Dead Podcast is a weekly poetry podcast exploring the work of poets old and new, with an “Agony Poet” and a little bit of craic mixed in!

Hello Friends, We hope you are having a great spring season filled with inspiration! Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter—it’s filled with creative opportunities for you and your writing: our annual Online Poetry Retreat is back; award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield will join us for a Zoom conversation; our Chapbook Prize is accepting submissions; and we have just released a new book in our Wilder Prize Poetry Book Series!

[A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595, in the National Portrait Gallery, London; image in public domain] "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”The Priory is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

( image by Ramon Gonzalez Teja, ca 1980) “Enforced presentism is a term coined by anthropologist Jane Guyer during the pandemic to discuss the experience of being dislocated from linear time, yet stuck in the present moment without recourse to imagine a future or romanticize the past. Events that disrupt our …

Dear friends, This week was an anniversary of a dear friend, Glenn, who died suddenly in the early days of Covid. June of 2020. The 4th. I got a phone call from his magnificent daughter, and — because I usually get texts, not calls, from her — I wondered if something was wrong. Something was wrong. She had to tell her dad’s friends that he’d died. My go…

Hey poets — this bulletin is late, because I’ve been spending time with family, walking in the woods with my dad, stopping for trilliums whenever we find them. We recently found out he has cancer, and the most honest thing I can say is that when he’s not well, I’m not well… We’re sorting out what this means in the near-term, and I’m listening for where …

Turkish is my mother tongue. The language of my grandmother, poetry and dreams. The amorphous shapes appearing in the dregs left at the bottom of coffee cups, waiting to be read. The sound of wind chimes. It is the smell of earth after a sudden storm, when you inadvertently search yourself, check your flesh, not sure…

Dreamlike is this week’s series of posts. A collection of my inner thoughts on writing, art, poetry. One a day, June 10-June 17. A challenge to myself, a bizarre thought experiment on pretentiousness, an examination of why I do what I do (write like a madwoman).

After thousands of you voted in the Trump Haiku Contest Runoff, we have a winner! This TBR Contest Special newsletter features the winning poem, analysis of the voting, and an exclusive interview with the triumphant poet. Contestants were asked to submit haikus on this theme: “Trump’s innermost musings as he sits in court.”

Seventh Heaven Standing at the Back Door of Happiness: And How I Unlocked It David Roche Harbour Publishing 192 pages, softcover The cover of Standing at the Back Door of Happiness features a startling photo of the author David Roche, the left side of his face mottled by an overgrowth of veins. The octogenarian has lived with the vascular malformation his en…

dark-blistered foxgloves Geoffrey Hill Once, before my children started school, we went on holiday to Cornwall in early June. Arriving in West Penwith, the southernmost part of the county, I was thinking of the poet W.S. Graham, who lived there for much of his life and was friendly with the artists around St. Ives.

May has been a pretty brutal month for me in terms of work. I’ve been drowning under acres of marking, from university. I’ve also been completing my first term as an External Examiner for Edge Hill University - which has been interesting, but also exhausting - in the way that doing anything new is exhausting in its uncertainty.

In my mid-20s, before I landed my first job in journalism, I had a blog. We don’t need to talk about the blog—it’s embarrassing now. But my loyal readers back then, consisting mostly of friends and family, loved one particular feature the most: the Annual Mermaid Cock Haiku Competition.

Happy Sunday, writers! Thank you for subscribing. Every other Sunday, you’ll receive eight literary submission opportunities, varying in audience and genre, that have been selected for quality and relevance. Submission Sunday relies on the support of paying subscribers.

If you find your true voice, bring it to the land of the dead. There is kindness in the ashes. And terror in non-identity. A little girl lost in a ruined house, this fortress of my poems. I write with the blind malice of children pelting a madwoman, like a crow, with stones. No—I don’t write: I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send me…

A friend asks me, What is the Story that needs to be told at this time? Synchronicity. I glance over three letters in the mail today from strangers who each thank me for the ways we have interconnected in the past. Last night, a participant in my writing class read us a poem he had found in a book he had been gifted from the library of a friend after her death. An hour later, her photograph showed up on his random screen saver. It was W S Merwin’s amazing poem, Thanks, which ends

There is nothing more infuriating to me than a growling stomach in the middle of a productive hour of writing. Before we get into it: I’m currently fundraising to help a family of 6 escape the war in Sudan! If you’ve gone out for coffee in the last week, if you have a very specific favorite pen that you loyally buy, if you’ve ever forgotten to cancel a …

Lately I’ve been reading the books of poet Kenneth Koch, an acclaimed writer who brought poetry into elementary schools in the 1960s. The lessons he created led to deeply imaginative poems. He shares them in his books ROSE, WHERE DID YOU GET THAT RED

The bias I have towards the world is a linguistic curve; I see words poking out of the soil among roots; poetry draped across the back of a chair as a lover plays with the hair of his sweetheart; words giggling in the silence, bunching themselves together like a flirtatious flock of sparrows. I believe humanity is a symbolic species, both liberated and …

Bless you, your circle, and all living things, Dear Soul, I am excited to join you next Wednesday, June 5 at 9am Pacific Daylight Time for our next virtual gathering as a part of my world tour, The Gathering, a poetry / book reading ceremony for collective freedom from oppression.

Free Submissions NOW OPEN for Poet of the Week and Poem of the Month Molly Zhu is a Chinese-American poet and attorney. She writes about alter egos, chasms, dreams, tears, rage, translation and the women in her life. She was twice nominated for Pushcart prizes and her work appears in

A few quick notes to start: My new novel, Small Rain, is out on September 3. Please preorder it by asking at your local bookstore, or from your favorite online retailer. Here are a few links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon