Geography Workshop Presents: Her Outdoors

 

This Thursday, 14th April, on the mighty Resonance FM, from 8-9pm:

Clear Spot

Geography Workshop Presents….Her Outdoors. Geography Workshop Presents questions assumptions about the ways in which our world is imagined. In this first programme, artists and writers Karen Lloyd, Alison Lloyd, Lucy Furlong and Morag Rose reflect on walking as practise, informed by the pejorative phrase ‘Er Indoors’. How does their work and the embodied practise of walking inform the way they narrate, enrich and question the narratives that dominate nature-writing, landscape and psycho-geography? Presented by Dr Jo Norcup. [Repeated Friday 9am.]

Thanks to Jo Norcup for inviting me to be involved. I had a great time meeting and talking with everyone, and felt inspired and fired-up afterwards.

I hope you enjoy listening in!

 

The Blood House, Sarer Scotthorne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Sarer Scotthorne’s first collection, published by Hesterglock Press in January, a ruby which dropped into my palms at the Bristol launch of Boscombe Revolution 3.
These poems demand to be read in one go; the pages are bursting with movement, quaking with emotion and physicality, fighting to break free of their constraints.
They wrangle with the stuff of life, of our closest relationships: grief and anguish; disappointment and despair; longing and desire. There is no holding back – the language is forceful, honest to the point of brutality, making for a challenging but visceral one-sitting read.
Scotthorne negotiates the loss of her father, the shock of the grief, invoking the myth of Oedipus in in her sequence, Poison
“down the lead pipes, rattling the fragments left in shattered windows.
A token from his once industrial; I bound a shard of glass and searched
The urine-scented halls until found his sleeping body on a shock of Ragwort.”
From Scene 1. Alone
Imagery juxtaposes machinery and corporeality, combined with inner city landscape; the decay of industry, concrete images of the mix of human detritus from sweat to beer cans, with perennial weeds- nature’s creeping into the liminal spaces we barely notice but recognise as part of our environment in contemporary urban life. Places of transformation.
Saraswati Murmurs, which is beautifully scored on the page, offers respite from the aftershocks of grief and seems to be a point of letting go:
“step                        onto soft mud
and slipped        under the water         I wanted         turned
water     my      body…”
Blood runs through this collection as the red thread of life. Cold metal and warm blood. Blood as a signifier for wounding and loss, of fear; blood as a threat; blood as heat; blood as contamination; blood as life; blood as acknowledgment of a beating heart, of reawakened desire; as life giver and as revival.
The Blood House is a courageous journey, pulsing with truth. Read it.

Nebula Zine

It’s always exciting when you receive a copy of a publication that you have a poem in. But when it arrives through the post, wrapped in black and holographic dots, a tissue paper version of the opening credits of the original Star Trek, then you know it’s a goody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nebula is a new zine, and Samina Bhatti, its editor, has put together a bijou first issue, which at A6 size, and just 8 pages long, manages to pack in poems, a dvd review, and a cartoon. The zine has a clear remit- sci-fi, with women-only contributors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, if you would like a FREE copy, or would like to submit work to the next issue please email nebulazine@outlook.com, or find out more via the Nebula Zine Facebook page.

FREE PUSSY RIOT

WE ARE ALL PUSSY RIOT – SIGN THE PETITION

Save The Women’s Library!

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The Women’s Library is under threat. More about it here

PLEASE take a moment to sign the petition here.

PLEASE! Spread the word- we cannot afford to lose it!

Push My Buttons

I discovered at the end of last week that the PayPal button on my web site had stopped working.

Luckily the person who designed my web site- the marvellous Martin Sherrell of Digital Itch – sorted it out for me pronto and I am in the happy position of being able to post out some more copies of my poetry map, Amniotic City.

This is a map of the Fleet Street/St Paul’s part of London, with thirteen poems inspired by walking and spending time in that part of the city.

More information on Amniotic City is available here.

Eve Ensler on Adrienne Rich

“She taught me that the lives of women existed in the future. And that language was the pathway to that future. She taught me women were living lives inside constructs of lives and that poetic grace and surprise could reveal shatter those constructs.”

From last Saturday’s MY HERO section in The Guardian

A Thousand Reasons (To be a Feminist)

Last Thursday, International Womens’ Day, Linda Grant found herself trending on Twitter. This was after tweeting about the fact that feminists fought hard for the things women take for granted now.  Her timeline became an avalanche of retweets from other women telling their own stories of sexist behaviour, way back when and even now. Read more about it here, on the Guardian website.  Today the archive of theses tweets goes live here, at http://athousandreasons.com/

The War on Women

I’ve been trying to keep this blog for poetry but I feel so disturbed and appalled by what is happening to women in the United States of America, that I am going to start posting about it here.

A fifteen year old girl is being accused of murder because she had a still-born baby at 36 weeks of her pregnancy. She faces a life-sentence…as I saw this, my father read this to me, from today’s Guardian newspaper: “…where infant mortality is on a par with Botswana…”. Where? Mississippi…where the above girl is being criminalised for losing her baby.

#WordlessWednesday #Occupy