"Rigor of beauty is the quest." – WCW
Once again, it took me about three seconds to choose my top three books from last month, I love it when it’s easy! I’ve already reviewed Reckless Paper Birds in full, so do go and read that post if you haven’t yet, and I’ll just give it a few words below. I know the whole…
I needed the God of my childhood to be useful so I folded him, shaped his pages into wings. Cranes at first, then more challenging roosters, swallows, owls. I pinched edges, split clauses to make word plumage. I fractured Leviticus into pleats. […] I bought Reckless Paper Birds, John McCullough’s third collection, after opening it…
The hunt is on: through ashes, photographs and lists, through bone and prayer, through violations – from ‘Utterance’ Jacqueline Saphra’s previous collection All My Mad Mothers, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017, and she returns with a stunning companion collection in which it is her father who takes centre stage. The poems…
…bewildered were the dead going about their days and nights in the dark putting their feet down carefully and finding themselves floating… – Alice Oswald, ‘Body’ …A light song of light swells up in the dark times, in wolf time and knife time, in knuckle and blood times; it hums a small tune in the…
This was a shorter reading month as I extended Pride reading up until July 5th, but I still managed to add three books to my ‘almost certainly on my shortlist for the year’ pile. I also just started writing about the first book (it was The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters) and realised that it…
June is Pride Month, and in London the Pride festival took place on July 6, so this post covers my reading up to that point. I read only books with LGBTQ+ authors or themes during the month, and although I did pick a top three, I thought I’d also share the rest of what I…
So many good books this month. It was hard to choose… But then I always say that – time to just accept it perhaps?! Best Queer Read: Tin Man, by Sarah Winman. I loved this. I was telling everybody about it, it was going to be in my top reads of the year. In my…
March was a more usual reading month for me, although I didn’t read as diversely as usual – lots of novels. The more I read, the harder it is to pick the three top books, but I like that. It makes me think more about what I’ve read, and forces me to articulate what it…