Other books that might interest you

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  The Impermanence of Lilies

  Daniel Yeo

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  The captain of the Titanic went down with his ship on 15 April, 1912. But thoughts have power, and those who endure in the stories of the living are said to continue to roam the world after their deaths. And so the captain wanders in search of the things he tried to find in life, and discovers his destiny intimately entwined with a painter who shares the same fate, not knowing that their paths had crossed a long time ago. 
   
  The Impermanence of Lilies is a melancholic tribute to the nature of life and a yearning for love, in a story that reaches across lifetimes, borders, and the space between two hearts. 
   
   
  "A poetic, poignant love letter to life. Daniel Yeo has important things to tell us about the painful beauty of impermanence, and he tells them with a tender lyricism." 
  -Melissa de Villiers, author of The Chameleon House 
   
  “A wistful travel narrative by the RMS Titanic Captain that dives into preternatural waters, flowing into surprising and surrealist tributaries of reflections on death, memory, identity, friendship, and unwaveringly, love.” 
  -Cyril Wong, poet and fictionist

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  USEFULNESS of HIPPOPOTAMUS THE -...

  Vincent J. Tomeo

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  I am staring at a blank piece of paper, wondering what to write. Where do I begin? My mind begins to wander-pleasant thoughts of Disney's Fantasia dance in my head. The dancing hippopotamus comes to mind, and this made me laugh. The result: I penned a poem on the hippopotamus from which a chapbook was born: The Usefulness of Hippopotamus: A Humorous Chapbook for Trying Times. 
  One cannot imagine a world without humor. Without humor, the world will be dark, cold, and a sad place, tragically lacking joy, cheerfulness, and laughter. 
  Humor is medicine. During rough times, humor will help lighten and lessen physical and mental anxiety. 
  In challenging times, I chose humor. During the Pandemic, I had to deal with my bladder cancer. In my struggle not to get depressed or dwell in negativity, to find solace, contentment, and peace, I chose to seek out beauty and laugh. 
  In search of happiness, the humor worked its charm, resulting in a treasure chest of joy. So, I wrote my chapbook, The Usefulness of Hippopotamus: A Humorous Chapbook for Trying Times and discovered humor even among the hippopotami! 
  You can, too. 
  Peace & flowers. Love & light. 
  Vincent J. Tomeo, Author/Poet

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  King Troll (The Fawn)

  Sonali Bhattacharyya

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  'I'll do anything for you. I can do anything for you.'
  Nikita and Riya are two South Asian sisters: insecure, stateless and desperate for somewhere to call 'home'.
  Nikita's work with young migrants requires her to keep her saviour complex in check as she negotiates the challenges and hypocrisy of the third sector. Meanwhile, Riya is offered the chance to create an advocate in the form of a homunculus (or fawn), and sees a chance to elevate herself above the cruelty meted out to others.
  Sonali Bhattacharyya's play King Troll (The Fawn) is a dark and dystopian exploration of migrant experiences in all their complexity – and the troll that lives within all of us, whispering 'me, not us', and definitely 'me first'. It was a finalist for the 2023 Women's Prize for Playwriting, and was first performed as a co-production between Kali Theatre and New Diorama Theatre, London, in 2024, directed by Milli Bhatia.

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  On the Subject of Blackberries

  Stephanie M. Wytovich

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  Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry 
  Welcome to the garden. Here we poison our fruits, pierce ourselves with thorns, and transform under the light of the full moon. Mad and unhinged, we fall through rabbit holes, walk willingly into fairy rings, and dance in the song of witchcraft, two snakes around our ankles, the juice of berries on our tongues. 
  Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, these poems are meditations on female rage, postpartum depression, compulsion, and intrusive thoughts. They pull from periods of sleep deprivation, soul exhaustion, and nightmarish delusions, and each is left untitled, a nod to the stream-of-conscious mind of a new mother. 
  Using found poetry and under the influence of bibliomancy, Wytovich harnesses the occult power of her imagery and words and aligns it with a new, more vulnerable, darkness. These pieces are not only visions of the madwoman in the attic, but ghostly visitations that explore the raw mental torture women sometimes experience after giving birth. 
  This collection heals as much as it scars, and is an honest look at how trauma seeps into the soil of our bodies. Her poems are imagined horrors, fictional fears, and all the unspoken murmurs of a mind lost between reality and dream. What she leaves in her wake is nothing short of horror—the children lost, the garden dead, the women feral, ready to pounce.

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  Poets on Poetry - The most...

  Matthew Arnold, Sarojini Naidu,...

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  Who has not tried to write a poem?  The poetic form of words seems to be rather easy.  In its basic form, which we learn as children, the rhyming couplet is, in a child’s written and spoken words, pure joy - success!  In the hands of a Shakespeare it is magnificent with a reach and understanding that the rest of us enjoy but are far from even attempting.    
   
  As we listen to various poetic forms, schools and movements we can only react with wonder at how these innocent words are assembled to create symphonies of ideas, wonder and revelation.  The emotions they seek to invoke can be anything from happiness to sadness, from love to revulsion. 
   
  Arnold, Stevens, Keats, Akhmatova, Browning, Herrick, Hood, Killigrew are but a few of the roll-call of wordsmiths who with mere words create ravenous beauty that reveals tender lines and sensitive verse on how and why they are who they are. 
   
  01 - Poets on Poetry - An Introduction 
  02 - When I Write Poems by Anna Akhmatova 
  03 - Of My Poems by Thomas MacDonagh 
  04 - An Apology For Her Poetry by Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish 
  05 - Sonnet 76 - Why is My Verse So Barren of New Pride by William Shakespeare 
  06 - The Austerity of Poetry by Matthew Arnold 
  07 - Of Modern Poetry by Wallace Stevens 
  08 - Poetry by Claude McKay 
  09 - The Poetry of Keats by George Meredith 
  10 - Future Poetry by Alice Meynell 
  11 - Sonnet 17 - Who Will Believe My Verse in Time to Come by William Shakespeare 
  12 - Poetic Eggs by Ezra Pound 
  13 - Poem by William Carlos Williams 
  14 - On the Grasshopper and Cricket by John Keats 
  15 - Ode on the Poetical Character by William Collins 
  16 - Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem by Alan Seeger 
  17 - A True Account of the Birth and Conception of a Late Famous Poem by Charles Sackville, Earl Of Dorset 
  18 - The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain by Wallace Stevens 
  19 - The Poet and the Poem by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 
  20 - Of English Verse by Edmund Waller 
  21 - Love, The Soul of Poetry by Anne Killigrew 
  22 - Why, If All Poets Crown Their Love with Verse by Emily Hickey 
  23 - Verse Making Was the Least of My Virtues by Robert Browning 
  24 - The Poet's Love-Song by Sarojini Naidu 
  25 - A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation by Aphra Behn 
  26 - Not Every Day Fit for Verse by Robert Herrick 
  27 - On the Poetic Muse by George Moses Horton 
  28 - Sonnet - Written in Keats by Thomas Hood 
  29 - Sonnet 86 -Was It the Proud Full Sail of His Great Verse by William Shakespeare 
  30 - Song in Imitation of Shakespeare by James Beattie 
  31 - The High-toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens 
  32 - Poetry is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens 
  33 - To My Most Dearly Loved Friend Henry Reynolds Esquire of Poets and Poesie by Michael Drayton 
  34 - His Poetry His Pillar by Robert Herrick 
  35 - To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses by Robert Herrick 
  36 - Poem for the End by Ivor Gurney

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  Do Jewish Lives Matter? - A Play

  Beverly Taylor

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  The play, “Do Jewish Lives Matter” arose out of the Crown Heights Riot in Brooklyn, a Pogrom where a Black boy was accidentally killed by a Hasidic driver with devastating results. James Baldwin, the famous Negro writer, as far back as 1948 wrote, “Georgia has the Negro as a target of hatred. Harlem has the Jew.” 
   In 1973 Rabbi Kahane wrote, “In no way should we refuse to see the danger to Jews that comes from Black hatred. It is of epidemic proportions.” And again in 1977, when addressing an audience, he said, “In Crown Heights, where poor Jews live side by side with Blacks and are regularly robbed, mugged, terrorized, a Black explosion against them is inevitable.”

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