Hi-Vis Press interviewed Burning House Press’ chief Arsonist Miggy Angel – Covering the subjects of art, recovery, class, mental health and addiction, and his journey from South London to become a writer and poet – check it out here! Xx
Lydia Towsey interviewed by Trevor Wright for Burning House Press
We first met at the launch of the Refugee anthology, Over Land, Over Sea. Poems for those Seeking Refuge (Five Leaves Press 2015). What was that project like for you?
It’s been very positive – a great idea. As an ordinary citizen, especially, or even in our current political climate, it’s easy to feel powerless. Ambrose (Musiyiwa) whose poem The Man Who Ran Through the Tunnel stimulated the anthology) thought this would be a way to mobilise lots of voices, not just from Leicester but from across the country and the world. Continue reading “A Burning House Press Interview With Lydia Towsey”
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
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.
The Arsonist Magazine Edition 01 – available to purchase here
Featuring the best poetry, flash fiction, photography, art, interviews and features from around the world, including the UK, Japan, Canada, USA, Malaysia, India, Philippines, Sweden:
stephanie roberts – Saquina Karla C. Guiam – Penny Goring – Adrianna Robertson – Anneghem Wall – Dawn Fredericks – badpoem – Dean Lilleyman – Antony Owen – Aina Izzah – Bruno Neiva – Paul Hawkins – Keith Ford – Joseph Ridgwell – Dhiyanah Hassan – C. R. Resetarits – Rob True – Sophie Pitchford – Jamie Thrasivoulou – Martin Appleby – Liz Zumin – Siddharth Dasgupta – Ben Williams – Caitlin Meredith – Adam Steiner – Jim Gibson – V.M. – Fredric Nord – Mark Goodwin – Hiromi Suzuki – Trevor Wright – Howie Good
The Arsonist Magazine Edition 01 is a 92 page full colour/b&w matt/gloss perfect-bound A5 magazine (this is a limited edition and, being the inaugural print publication from Burning House Press, is sure to be a collectible item)
The Arsonist Magazine Edition 01 – available to purchase here
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”
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
Britain’s Most Wanted
It was while opening a package from the States
That it happened
The package contained the artwork to my latest novel
Burrito Deluxe
By Calif’s finest
Jose Arroyo
Holed up and rolling with the punches
East of East LA
The artwork was perfect for
The novel and nobody but Arroyo could’ve come up with it
Unique
But as I stood there admiring the creation
Britain’s Most Wanted
Came on the television
A list and faces of UK’s most wanted criminals
And the shock when I heard the name
And looked up
And there on my television
In High Definition
Was the hero of my novel
The inspiration and catalyst to
Everything that had happened
On our great Mexican adventure
The man who once said the creation of a myth
Was the only thing he was interested in
And that if you join them, you will always be at odds with them
And everything they stand for
And there he was on the run
Still running free
And laughing at the sun
Long may he run. Continue reading “4 Poems by Joseph Ridgwell”
my body is not my body
when i’m held mouth wide open, blood oozing, dreading your extraction of part of my body. i’m only six. i’m not asleep. i never forgot.
i’m eighteen. adult, or so they say. part of my body breaks so more space is filled with you & all you carry. it hurts. in retrospect, it always hurt. it always will. Continue reading “‘my body is not my body’ by Nadia Gerassimenko”
Iconic
The half-suns laid in brick —
tan curves on a red face —
close in on each other
but never touch.
They will not come together
to brighten the sky.
They will not kiss your face
with rays of light.
The Arsonist Magazine edition 01 – featuring flammable materials from 30 international writers artists photographers – Coming Soon
Halfway Up The Street
She stops to light a fag, watches some sparrows fight over batter-bits, left by a slow-blown chip-paper that tumbleweeds across the Courthouse grass.
From the pavement she squints to make out the headline exclaiming Sandie Shaw a winner.
She drags deep on her fag, exhales, puts both hands back on the pram and starts walking, steering around a curled mound of dog muck.
Jean and her sisters watched the Eurovision on their new second-hand black and white TV on Saturday night, bought by her mam the weekend before from a woman at work.
Jean and her sisters gasped when Sandie’s microphone didn’t work at first, and then moved as one to the edge of the new second-hand settee when Sandie’s voice came through loud and clear.
Jean would like her hair cut like Sandie’s, but for now she wears it in a beehive.
She stoops by the cenotaph to pull the backs of her sandals up, and to stop her heart beating fast she sings the first line of Sandie’s chorus, almost breathing it into the mouth of the pram.
Say you love me madly, I’ll gladly, be there.
She frowns, drags on her fag, then starts reading the blackened names on the cenotaph.
For those who fell.
She gets as far as Evans G, then understands these names mean nothing to her, and placing one hand on the pram, she moves on in slow measured steps, fag in mouth, using her free hand to check her hair.
In the mirror this morning she thought she looked older. This is something she wants, and has been practising an older face. The older face doesn’t smile.
She takes her fag out and glances down to her belly and legs as she walks. In her brown suede miniskirt her belly has lost its little pudding, and she thinks her legs have gained nothing after the birth.
In the distance, the Post Office clock looks like it reads a quarter to one, but she can’t be sure without her glasses.
Jean puts the brake on the big old pram and moves around to the side of it, peering into the flaky chrome struts that hold the hood up. Her black eyeliner is thick today, and her slate-grey eyes stare back between curls of peeling silver.
She rubs the loose flakes off and wishes she had a new pram.
When the woman from the Social came to tell her someone had donated a used pram and did she want it, Jean felt happy. She walked all the way across town to a big old house to collect it. The woman who was donating the pram smiled at Jean, but she could tell the woman was judging her.
Jean’s mam warned her people would be like this when she came home with the baby.
Jean knew this anyway.
Lifting the brake with the toe of her sandal, Jean and the pram move off slowly. She still has quarter of an hour until she meets Mick, and Mick is always late.
Her heart starts beating faster again when she thinks of him, and she hates herself for not being strong and calm like an older woman would.
She parks the pram by the bench and sits down, pulling her skirt down lower.
Stamping her fag out, she remembers Mick’s face when she told him she was pregnant. She remembers the flicker of shock in his eyes, the blink, then the grin, the Oh well I suppose we’d best get married then.
5th Weekend
We’re in this old converted fire station and Sean is on stage doing a speech about how he draws inspiration from nostalgia and the working class and his mates and how his art means everything to him and how he’s so happy that we all came out to support him. He finishes and the hall full of a good few hundred people erupts with applause and cheers. He jumps off the stage and these four skinny lads get on the instruments and start thrashing out this punky song. Continue reading “5th Weekend – TJ Corless”
Safety Pin
Will a safety pin be enough
To quell the din of racism
And help those on the sharp end of abuse
Loosen xenophobia’s noose?
Are you pinning your hopes on too little?
SUBMISSIONS FOR THE 1ST EDITION OF THE ARSONIST MAGAZINE NOW OPEN – SEND US YOUR BEST – CANT WAIT TO SEE WHAT YOU MADE X
The Heat
when we were young
and time was free,
our skin danced in bronze
crafted by sunlight’s constancy
our footsteps whispered
in fields of green and the distance
between us was a heartbeat,
caught in the hum of laughter
about something silly, I’m sure,
but now the reason is gone
as much as who we were,
once—when summer knew us best
for all I know now is heat,
how to harness it by air conditioning,
while seconds rise like goosebumps
to steal the rest of youth away
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
‘Our survival deserves a dirty prayer praising our divine faults and everlasting selves.’ – Rachel McKibbens Interview for Burning House Press
On the release of her latest poetry collection – blud – Adrianna Robertson interviewed Rachel McKibbens for Burning House Press.
I first contacted Rachel McKibbens because I had been—as I often am—considering what it means to write about mental illness. I wanted to have more conversation about why it matters to write poems about mental health, how it factors into one’s identity as a human and a writer, and what it is to attempt to put the experience of it into words. At the same time, I was reading more and more of Rachel’s work (I picked up Pink Elephant and couldn’t put it down) and I felt like I had to tell someone—or as many people as possible, that these poems were opening a door. The new poems in blud left me with that same breathless feeling. Again, I found myself reading them aloud, handing them to friends and my students. Yet, when I sat down to type my questions for this interview, I knew it was impossible to say all I wanted to say—how to describe all that these poems bring forth in me: sorrow, heartbreak, awe, kinship…and always surprise. Finally, I settled on some questions and what follows are Rachel’s eloquent and evocative answers, though they would have been this regardless of what I had asked. And, perhaps more important than any perfect word I could come up with to describe this collection, is this: we need these poems and I am so grateful to Rachel for writing them.
Continue reading “‘Our survival deserves a dirty prayer praising our divine faults and everlasting selves.’ – Rachel McKibbens Interview for Burning House Press” →
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