GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
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Four poems by Sarah Fletcher
Well Versed is edited by JODY PORTER
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
Lads
With them, sex feels like miming drowning;
with gapped mouths gasping, their rower’s arms
too heavy from the drink to pull them back
to shore, the thrashing, the feeling
of being below the surface, the grabbing.
& waking next to them in morning,
the bed having spat back their sleeping bodies
to the sun, having fished them into sobriety
like a plastic bag wrenched from a river,
when they are on their backs and gorgeous
like funeral home corpses —
this is when they are most beautiful —
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