Subscribe by Email

Brand 06

Published twice a year out of the University of Greenwich , Brand is a magazine specialising in the short form. There’s short and micro fiction, poems, creative non-fiction, artwork and, refreshingly, performance texts and short plays. It has an edgy, urban aesthetic, and I feel has been getting stronger by the issue.

In her introduction to issue 6 just published, editor-in-chief Nina Rapi writes (in the context of addressing questions of collaborative and cross-genre writing): “Perhaps we should not be looking for either/or solutions but rather for both/and, openended-ness rather than closure, as unsettling as this may often be.” This strikes me as a fairly accurate description of what this magazine is trying to do.

Brand 06 includes a short poem of mine, ‘Measures for the Prevention of Crime’, alongside work by (among others) Gary Allen, Dzifa Benson, Linda Black, Angela Gardner, Sophie Mayer, Anjan Saha and John Saul, a short essay from Mikhail Karikis and an interview with Howard Barker.

There will be a launch of Brand 06 on 8 July at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, during Text in Context: a Cross-Genre Symposium (part of the London Literature Festival).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ISLA Festival 2014

Organised and presented by Instituto Cervantes in Dublin, ISLA is a festival of literature now in its third year that focuses on writers from or with links to Ireland, Spain and Latin America. This year the programme of events runs over three days, between 17 and 19 October, and features 21 authors (including John Banville, Claire Keegan and Hugo Hamilton) engaging in a range of discussions and readings. There are also screenings of documentaries on Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz. I'm participating in a reading & discussion with title 'Building Identities' taking place on the fist day of the festival, Friday 17 October - also featuring Donal Ryan and Anamaría Crowe Serrano and chaired by Philip Johnston of University College Dublin (UCD). We start at 6.15pm. The venue for all events is the Institute's Café Literario at Lincoln House, Lincoln Place, Dublin 2. Admission is free - but due to limited capacity the Institute encourages those interested to book
Read more

Herbarium

Herbarium is an anthology of poems, edited by James Wilkes , celebrating and exploring the contemporary resonances of medicinal plants and herbs. It features contributions from over 50 poets and is published in celebration of the Urban Physic Garden , a pop-up community-built garden of medicinal plants installed in Southwark this summer by Wayward Plants - a collective of architects, designers, artists and urban growers - with the aim of blooming a slice of neglected London land for a short period. The garden is open to visitors Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6pm, until 15 August 2011. For the anthology, each species in the garden was selected by a participating poet, who then produced a poem around it. My contribution ('Sincerely') relates to the herb gravelroot. Gravelroot is a "white- and purple-flowered plant up to 3m/10ft; North American Indian red dye plant" ( The Complete Book of Herbs , Clevely and Richmond, Lorenz Books, 1994). Its roots and seedheads
Read more

Stone and Sea - Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture

On Monday 9 October I'll be reading at the opening of the poetry & photography exhibition  Stone and Sea  in Pafos Municipal Gallery. Part of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture programme, Stone and Sea is "a poetic meeting and a photographic exhibition by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot photographers, that have the stone and the sea as their points of reference; elements that are inextricably linked with the fate of Cypriot people and of crucial importance for the shaping of their temperament. The project combines a walk through rocks deeply rooted in the soil, statues and pebbles of the coastline, with the reflective gazing of the sea, which is anticipated as an uncorrupted cultural value, a place of eutopia open to diversity." Readings by several invited poets with links to Cyprus will be accompanied by a trilingual presentation of the poems - in Greek, Turkish and English. I'm delighted that as part of this my poem 'Full Circle' from The A
Read more