A Woman Needs A Coat
A woman needs a coat
And a hat
And a roof
A woman needs a friend
And an enemy Continue reading “3 Poems by Debra Watson”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Hello Florence! Thanks so much for agreeing to speak with me here on Burning House Press. I’m fascinated by your bio: you’re a PhD student in physics who also writes poetry. I’ve got to ask, why? What draws you to both physics and poetry?
Hi Amee! Thanks a lot for this opportunity. Oddly enough, the driving force was, & still is, the same in both cases: a thirst for equilibrium, the urge to build an extension upon my collage-like experience of the world; to challenge myself out of my comfort zone, towards areas left uncharted on my maps; to counterbalance an excess of centripetence; to overwrite certainties; to ride a Trojan horse within my own fortress, then to open the gates to cross-pollination.
“my favourite places to roam are borderlands”
Continue reading “An Interview with Physicist and Poet Florence Lenaers”
//The exorcist leaves our solar system
Called by their kindness, some, and
cursed to serve, others, but
I am just hungry, from room
to room nick-nacking
He sets the oven doors ajar
and moves the pictures all awry:
the house is breathing on the shore,
the house is angled at the sky. Continue reading “3 Poems by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell”
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
I invited poet and artist stephanie roberts — who has poems on Burning House Press and in The Arsonist Magazine — to trade lines of poetry with me. I’d never collaborated with another poet before, so the experience was something of a leap into the unknown. We began emailing poem shreds back and forth. The days flowed by, as did the weeks; the lines formed and shifted. Soon, a poem emerged —
(α) ANB:
Lacewings quake in the crepitation of thistles
& reeds. Crickets creak wintled heartbeats dry.
(β) stephanie roberts:
It would have been perfect, the river remapped boundary;
the embryonic recreates in its image.
Continue reading “a conversation in poetry with stephanie roberts”
Bill Moran (Good Ghost Bill) is a poet, performer and writer from Austin, Texas – and Bill was in Nottingham to perform for us at Speech Therapy whilst on his recent European tour back in May. Continue reading “‘The Good Ghost Bill Moran’ by Miggy Angel”
Homeward Bound
I sang to my Father
on his deathbed.
He had not spoken a word
in days, cancer-ridden,
organs collapsing, high on morphine,
but I knew he could still hear me. Continue reading “2 Poems by Scott Thomas Outlar”
Radio Molar Signal
One moss harbor,
winding clocks in center’s orbit, wobbling
circus –
three camera’s, a candle vessel – paddling through power lines, black then white.
Sure – a noise dreamt cricket –
Weave these prayers into flux –
refine metals, resemble the limbo we sing in fisheries,
under long,
black silhouettes
shining onto one light, our mugwort song. Continue reading “2 Poems by Fin Sorrel”
ANONYMOUS ROOMS
Five hundred miles off
On a night of no surrender
Amid the bedrock and the pine
In the anonymous rooms
Where we whisper salvations
To the prayer flags on the walls
For the sake of our sins
Now fixed upon the surface
Of the love we yield to the grave
At the gates of some heaven
When the message comes clear
This damn destiny is all we deserve
With one of the poems that opens Edition 01 of The Arsonist Magazine here is the incredible Canadian poet and artist stephanie roberts reading ‘Catawampus’!
Gravity Falls, the Dusk is Claimed
Return your tray to the window on the right.
Ignore the grasping hands within.
They jigger the lights as you walk to remind you,
never a footfall invests in the shadow lines
without a hesitation. Continue reading “‘Gravity Falls, the Dusk is Claimed’ by Matthew Smart”
FIRST KISS
Bone tongue sticking out of grinning knee,
a mouth where it shouldn’t be,
wet and pink like a lizard’s gawp,
a mean mimic of the mouth
that’s screaming into silence
the whole of the playground. Continue reading “3 Poems by Thomas McColl”
Shimmering Pebbles
May your world be cast
Into tiny shimmering pebbles
Set upon a bookshelf
Arranged in the chapters of your life Continue reading “‘Shimmering Pebbles’ by Martin Dean”
The Best Of A Bad Situation – by Jamie Thrasivoulou
– poetry collection published by Silhouette Press
Jamie Thrasivoulou has seen the zeitgeist and, to be honest, he’s disgusted. These poems are translators of tarmac, asphalt whisperers, mediators of a sonic correspondence between broken hearts and broken promises, busted causeways and lost causes, high hopes fallen down and low-roads taken up. One of the greatest sights in contemporary poetry is to witness Jamie Thrasivoulou explode these poems on an unsuspecting audience. Let’s call it the truth, let’s call it word and testimony, let’s call it the salvo and the salve, let’s call it what it is. ‘The Best Of A Bad Situation’ is the most urgent, vital collection of poetry you will read all year. This is gonna hurt you much more than it will Jamie, but it’s a word-surgery that the body and mind require. Don’t thank the man, he doesn’t want nor need it. Just buy this book, read it, imbibe it’s blood-spirit and turn your life over to the justice and insistences of its restorative frequencies.
– Miggy Angel, author of ‘Grime Kerbstone Psalms’
Continue reading “The Best Of A Bad Situation – Jamie Thrasivoulou”
Between the years 1990 – ’93, the poet Paul Hawkins was squatter/occupier/protestor in one of the most contested of spaces in the U.K.’s recent and past history of place-and-occupancy wars. Claremont Road, in London’s East End, was an occupied site and scene for the protests of the ‘No M11 Link Road Campaign’. Paul Hawkins was there, and has documented what took place in his book, Place Waste Dissent, published by Influx Press.
In the foreword to the book, Alice Nutter refers to Claremont Road as ‘the symbol of resistance to the road-building programme of the early ’90s’ – Place Waste Dissent operates not only as flame held close as intimate torchlight illuminating that symbol, but as intravenous entry point into the sign itself. An immersive invocation of the sign and the times it symbolises, a border-shamanic reanimation act that brings Claremont Road back breathing bleeding spitting and bounding into the now. Into the Now that requires reckoning with what was and is still its Then.
Hush
Our girls walk with their hands in their pockets. Arms over bellies.
Slip through this city.
Stay soft, our girls are told. Stay quiet.
Our girls who drop their chins and gazes as they pass your boys.
Your boys who smile like they’ve never known sadness. Continue reading “‘Hush’ by Kate Berwanger”
Firewoman Shimmies at Canyon Mouth Park
Your hair—slicked flame spikes. You built this blaze
beside the shoals to mirror their brash shine.
Scavenging downed wood along the water’s edge,
collecting branches up the pass— sunshine’s spring splurge—
our daughters found tangled nests— driftwood globes—
balled stakes, stems, moss and trash—fuel for fire shine. Continue reading “5 Poems by Laura Secord”
I woke up thinking of you,
and the word, Komorebi
Japanese, for the light
that filters through the trees
I woke up and thought of the sunshine I found
in your arms
in your eyes
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
Poetry as Experience
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Note: Creators, would you like to be interviewed for one of my Burning House Press blog posts? See the details at the end of this post.
Continue reading “Poetry as Experience” →
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