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  Bad Weather Mammals - Poems

  Ashley-Elizabeth Best

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  “The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing,” Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite “ODSP 1, 2, & 3,” which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.

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  I Done Clicked My Heels Three...

  Taylor Byas

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  Inspired by The Wiz, this debut, full-length poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman's quest for self-discovery—one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power 
   
   
   
  I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times takes its inspiration and concept from the cult classic film The Wiz to explore a Black woman's journey out of the South Side of Chicago and into adulthood. The narrative arc of The Wiz—a tumultuous departure from home, trials designed to reveal new things about the self, and the eventual return home—serves as a loose trajectory for this collection, pulling listeners through an abandoned barn, a Wendy's drive-thru, a Beyoncé video, Grandma's house, Sunday service, and the corner store. At every stop, the speaker is made to confront her womanhood, her sexuality, the visibility of her body, alcoholism in her family, and various ways in which narratives are imposed on her. 
   
   
   
  Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn't just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.

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  Folk Punk Literary Style - The...

  Patrick Schneeweis

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  There are artists out there able to lift the spirits of the downtrodden, who point towards a better world with all they are. Sometimes, they do this in DIY punk style: raw, unplugged, and deeply human.Patrick Schneeweis, better known as Pat the Bunny, is an artist who chose the road less travelled, instinctively deeming it more honest and less controlling. Freer. He grew up in Vermont, where he found people liked his voice and the controversial topics he tackled, and by 16 years old, he had released his first album ‘Fire Hazard’.Pat had the courage to test his reality, and then nakedly vocalise it (in both the metaphorical and literal senses). His lyrics saw conflicting ideologies meet and fight to the death, in outlooks that were as captivating as his personal anecdotes were relatable. Pat’s journey offers direction to the lost, if only in the promise that so is he; and for all his youthful anarchism and burn-it-to-the-ground spiritedness, his commentary of the world is ironically sobering.Pat’s music career only spanned thirteen years, from 2003-2016. He reincarnated several times in different bands of his own making, and split albums with other folk-punk artists equally hungry to change the world. He fought like hell for a vision of peace, and made the battlegrounds his own state of consciousness.Like a flashfire burning everything in its wake, towards the end of his career, Pat’s had simmered down, but shoots of new life had sprung up from the ashes, a new direction for which his life could take.This book paints the picture of Pat’s fallings and risings, a final cadence before he left the punk scene behind him for good.

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  Born in England – Exploring...

  Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley...

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  Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another.  Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us. 
   
  Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy. 
   
  In the volumes of this series, we take a look at poetry through the prism of individual regions of England, or sometimes more quaintly known as ‘Albion’, or ‘Blighty’, through the centuries of its gloried history. 
   
  England, despite its perception of reserve and under-statement has, in reality, strode the global stage at various time in many things, both good and bad, from Empire to long distance running. Here our focus in on its literature.  Famed for its fiction and dramas, it is equally admired for its plethora of gifted poets and the dazzling verse which has added so much to its artistic legacy.  These classic poets are wonders of their age and of their art.  Genius is written in their names. 
   
  In this volume we explore the poets of the South-East.  Although only a small fragment of the island it is layer-rich in gentle natural landscapes and poetic beauty that hold in thrall all who take time to absorb the wonder of their words.  Our poets include Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Robert Seymour Bridges and many others.

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  Stormbound

  Irtika Kazi

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  n her first poetry chapbook, the poet talks about her growth as a writer, how she was encouraged, amidst uncertainty and fear, by time spent in different landscapes and by exposure to evolution, to the wide array of events that took place in congruence with art and writing. The poems in this chapbook are interwoven with diverse themes ranging from emotions to social concerns and slivers of mythology.

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  Mrs Warren's Profession

  Bernard Shaw

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  'I am my mother's daughter. I am like you. But my work is not your work, and my way is not your way.'
  Vivie Warren is a woman ahead of her time. Estranged from her wealthy mother, she delights in a glass of whisky and a good detective story, and is determined to carve herself a sparkling legal career in an age ruled by men.
  Her mother, however, is a part of that old patriarchal order. Exploiting it has earned Mrs. Warren a fortune and paid for her daughter's expensive education – but at what cost?
  Bernard Shaw's incendiary moral classic was written in 1893, but, after being banned by the Lord Chamberlain, didn't receive a full public production in London until 1925. This version of the play, edited and introduced by director Dominic Cooke, was produced at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End in 2025, starring real-life mother and daughter Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter.

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