MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Jonathan Taylor - Liar
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Liar
Jonathan Taylor
Long before presidents seemed so crazy
(though that might well have been illusory),
long before anyone mentioned global warming,
before wars were anything but bottled messages
washed up on the sinking island of childhood,
and before disease bludgeoned you to death
over godforsaken months and years,
I cracked my head open on a metal railing.
In hospital you held my hand when I cried
and told me everything – head, world,
et cetera – would be okay. You lied.
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ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
by Widad Nabi