Emily Berry’s latest collection is Unexhausted Time.
It’s a sorry situation when the most repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled....
The Expansion Project is Ben Pester’s first novel. There is little about its opening that hints at the weirdness of the imagination which created it, though a reader familiar with Pester’s short stories may have some suspicions. The title story of Am I in the Right Place? (2020) features a ‘Mondelux single-man-in-a-bedsit oven with rotisserie setting’ that turns out...
Mary Ruefle is the kind of poet who can make Tupperware seem transcendent. Here’s the beginning of her ten-line rapture ‘Peridot’, which compares a rotting lime to a semi-precious gemstone:
I awoke in an ecstasy.The sky was the colour of a cut limethat had sat in the refrigeratorin a plastic containerfor thirty-two days.Fact-checkers, check.
American poets have never tired...
When I had a bad back, I used to go to a special gym for people with musculoskeletal pain. My father had been recommending it for years but of course I paid no attention to him. It was only when someone else also spoke highly of it that I thought it might be worth a try. Kieser Training is a Swiss company specialising in strength training whose UK branch (RIP) was located in the basement of the art deco Carreras Cigarette Factory building in Mornington Crescent. The effigies of two enormous black cats guard its entrance, and the façade is adorned with the faces of further black cats that stare down at the street with yellow eyes. The gym, by contrast, was delightfully utilitarian, with no music or TV screens, just a large room full of complicated-looking machinery into which comparatively tiny people were folded, slowly raising and lowering their limbs
Selima Hill’s work often seems tactile – or ‘sensory’, as she herself has described it. Some of the short poems have the immediacy and speechlessness of found objects or readymades. And, like such objects, they can feel indivisible, complete in themselves, so that one hardly thinks of quoting from them except in their entirety.
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