Tag: female

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How to Carry Fire

In this second collection, the poet uses symbols of fire and water to navigate trauma and recovery, Luanne Thornton writes

PUBLISHED ON: 29/06/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Christina Thatcher’s How to Carry Fire recognises the rich potential of symbolising fire, and skilfully uses it to explore trauma in her second collec …

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Wild Spinning Girls

Desi Tsvetkova enjoys the descriptions of Wales’ landscapes in this novel about dead mothers and the search for identity, but is disappointed by flat characters and script, as well as predictable plot twists

PUBLISHED ON: 05/05/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Published by the Welsh press Honno, Wild Spinning Girls is the third notch on Carol Lovekin’s writing belt. Lovekin’s fiction focuses on strong female …

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Jim Neat: The Case of a Young Man Down on His Luck

Desi Tsvetkova concludes that this hybrid novel/confessional narrative poem is an exceptional piece of literature

PUBLISHED ON: 05/05/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

Mary J Oliver’s father passed away in 1983, but it isn’t until twenty-five years later that a spark ignites inside the author, urging her to find out …

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Lost

Desi Tsvetkova enjoys an Indian-set young adult novel about being ripped from privilege and shaking off the conditioning of a luxurious life

PUBLISHED ON: 02/03/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

After the critical success of her award-winning debut novel, Boy 87, Ele Fountain returns with yet another heart-wrenching, yet eye-opening young adul …

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Where The Wild Ladies Are

Georgia Fearn considers this interlinked collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories, with a feminist take, to be a downright genius reinvention containing fiction that will connect with every woman in the modern world

PUBLISHED ON: 02/03/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

When I first began to read Where The Wild Ladies Are, a downright genius reinvention of traditional Japanese ghost stories by Matsuda Aoko, I was not …

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The Nightingale Silenced and Other Late Unpublished Writings

‘The Nightingale Silenced’ was Margiad Evans final extended prose piece before her death. Ed Garland assesses it as feat of creative self-observation, a report from the unsettling parallel universe of a 1950s neurological institute and a memoir of what the author herself describes as ‘a prose illness, though many would expect its explosiveness to uncover poetry’

PUBLISHED ON: 01/03/20

CATEGORY: Reviews

‘The Nightingale Silenced’ was Margiad Evans final extended prose piece before her death. Ed Garland assesses it as feat of creative self-observation, …

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The Night Circus and Other Stories

Alex Diggins enjoys a translated story collection in which the female uncanny is brought into the home

PUBLISHED ON: 29/10/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

A suicide contemplates her body from above, flicking through its history of abuses as if on a film reel. A bored housewife, cauterised by domesticity …

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Brando’s Bride : The incredibly true story of Anna Kashfi and her marriage to one of Hollywood’s greatest stars

Chris Moss

PUBLISHED ON: 30/07/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

Marlon Brando is one of those movie heartthrobs we don’t quite get anymore – and I mean ‘get’ in both senses of the word. Odd-looking, with his sly ey …

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Hand and Skull

Mari Ellis Dunning

PUBLISHED ON: 26/06/19

CATEGORY: Reviews

Zoe Brigley’s third collection of poetry is a tender exploration of gender, cruelty, violence, myth, motherhood and physicality. Sometimes unsettling, …

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Jumping Frogs

Emily Blewitt

PUBLISHED ON: 07/05/19

CATEGORY: Editorial

I write this twenty-eight weeks into pregnancy. I write while sitting in my living room, surrounded by the detritus of baby preparations and poetry su …

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