‘This blend of cultural retrospection and daring artistic experimentation, fusing the international visual language of avant-garde art trends with distinctive national themes, characterizes Ukrainian art of the period.’
Konstantin Akinsha and Katia Denysova on In the Eye of the Storm, opening 29 June at the Royal Academy.
‘There’s something so powerful about what he can do with an object.’
Katie Tobin speaks to Jamieson Webster, author of Disorganisation & Sex.
‘I love the immediacy of the first marks on blank paper. This is often where I can see my own energy coming through.’
Annie-Rose Fiddian-Green on Breathing With Trees, now showing at Brooke-Walder Gallery.
‘I’m the way she likes anyone left behind — / undeserving, falling.’
New poetry by Michael Martin.
‘She’s losing tins of custard powder & / baby formula and she’s crushing the body / & blood of Christ under her arm while / John Junior tucks into a doughnut.’
New poetry by Laura Varnam.
‘The train driver’s one straight line, as / he calls to mind his schoolboy love / or stillborn child whose name haunts / like an abandoned station.’
New poetry by Christopher M James.
‘Sobriety does get quite uninteresting fairly fast, but if any period of sobriety is interesting, then it’s this.’
Marina Scholtz talks to Michael Deagler about his forthcoming novel, Early Sobrieties.
‘But if she was brown-eyed or blue-eyed, / they will not recall, only that her eyes / asked a question that no one could answer.’
New poetry by Damen O’Brien.
‘If all the protesters were smiling serenely, / would a scowling woman become / the punctum? Or is a scowling woman / too much of a cliché to be a punctum?’
New poetry by Lisa Kelly.
‘I hope that, with this collection, the anglophone world will continue to expand its interest in world literature; not just the foreign, but the queer, the poor, the almost untranslatable.’
Esmee Wright reviews Pedro Lemebel’s A Last Summer of Queer Apostles.
‘As he writes in The Music of Time, ‘to make a poem at all is an act of hope’, for a future in which somebody is present, attending to the music and the craft.’
Tom Branfoot remembers the late John Burnside.
‘What figure / is the chance that a poet can appear / on praise.’
New poetry from Nicholas Hogg.
‘But language often fails at being accurate (if accuracy is even the aim), so I’m also interested in the things that writing can and can’t pull off.’
Jamie Cameron talks to Rowland Bagnall about his new collection, Near-Life Experience.
‘I guess maybe that’s called haunting, that magic pull of things akin to those in our glass boxes, things that cannot last.’
New writing by Tallulah Griffith.
‘I see the role of the artist to be nuanced. While exploring big ideas is one role an artist can take, I find myself hoping to create art that lets the complexity of situations exist within the work.’
Eric Block speaks to Andrea Khôra about her new film, RAPTURE.
‘But that’s often how art works. It’s intuitive. It’s murky. You’re creeping along in the dark until you’re not.’
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou speaks to Danielle Dutton about her latest collection, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other.
‘To the enigmatic prose of the Bible, Oliveira layers meaning upon those ruins, not to move the story on, but to give voice to the unspoken fear.’
Esmee Wright reviews Anthony Oliveira’s Dayspring.
‘It is a book that engages thought and ideas more than feeling; this is poetry as extreme metaphysical sport.’
Nicola Healey reviews Ali Lewis’s Absence.
‘On social media, Twitter and text messages, I do try to couch my messages in eloquent, pithy words though. It seems important to me.’
Erik Martiny talks to Amélie Cordonnier.
‘And again – I arrive to set out my fears, / to still rot in watery luck.’
New poetry by Holly Pollard.
‘As our high streets struggle to survive changing shopping habits, brought by the pandemic, the rising cost of living and online purchasing, perhaps we need to revisit Biba’s spirit of playfulness, optimism and laughter – an opportunity unfortunately missed by this show.’
Deborah Nash on The Biba Story at The Fashion and Textile Museum.
‘Our world is quite self-validating at the moment, and not always for the right reasons.’
We spoke to Phoebe Stuckes about her debut novel, Dead Animals, out today.
‘I hope my works, whether they are playful or cruel, can more or less point towards the ultimate proposition — absurdity.’
We spoke to Can Sun about his forthcoming show, Brusies, at Mandy Zhang Art.
