STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
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Pretty in Pink
Masterful poems reveal revolutionary potential in women’s experience
FINGER ON THE PULSE: Ruth Aylett
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
RUTH AYLETT’S new collection Pretty in Pink is written in a “fury of hope” for the political coming of age of a new generation shorn of patriarchy and gender stereotypes.
And there is no doubt where her loyalties lie. She summons the presence of the murdered Rosa Luxemburg: “I was,” says the revolutionary. “I am. I will be.”
At the book’s centre is the poem The Chosen One — Sestina for a Lost Child, which tests the expressive power of words to the limit. Within its dreamy meditative structure — a free-form mantra — she appears to grieve the miscarriage of a child: “a red life leaves/the body, a not-yet-child.”
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From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin