Issue 39 | Sept 2019 |

The Sunday visits  Pretty dress on Hair tied up with Daisy pins in Leather shoes Polished and  She is ready Ready as a...

Modern love tales I’ll put on After the Gold Rush, Sgt Peppers, Blue how much a graph of me this gives is best...

THE ROADMAP My body is a roadmap,  Of white ridges, undulating hills and Curves of red, mingling with slashes of grey,  As if a...

FRESH FACES Hello there, may I enquire  whether or not you’d like to invest in a face?  I’ve many spare  and can easily...

SOLO SPOONING & TRANSCENDENCE In the whispering silences of post-midnight solitude Where ghosts of rampant angst are pulled and stretched in Munch-like menace...

OTHERWISE OCCUPIED You think I am not listening  but I am just not listening to you I am trained to keep listening ...

AFTER MAKING LOVE WITH THE LIGHTS ON, DOORS WIDE OPEN resting my head on your shoulder when you said there is no...

This sky we share Just-built houses  stretch upwards lunging at ocean views  angling out inlanders blocking older shacks  shading neighbouring yards. ...

Edward Lee -Absence Eased My daughter lives forty-eight kilometres from me in the house I bought with her mother, the house I still own; the...

We met the group next morning and shared the 4w drive of our guide, David, for our  trip to Wadi Sareen Wildlife Reserve, about...

This Petty Pace If tomorrow is now                      where did time go? Was...

MONSOON Hard buckshot comes the rain, the first monsoon rain,  the first ever real rain for months.  All conversation dies, all plans are...

Deer Medicine In night white with birch and moon your heart hears hooves  crossing its wide plateau  a slow steady pulse keeping...

PUBLIC DECREES All is transparency, rose red in the black white squares of dawn, a pale electric in an afternoon...

NavigatorA hawk head of a sun.Neck line & forearms,wind hushed redfrom the grip of the unexpected heat. I watch youin this flipped world.Navigator.Stargazer of the flicker...

INCIDENT IN AISLE 5 I was almost as tall as the shopping trolley,  I could see up and through its bars...

THEME FOR ARTHUR And, As close as poetry can take you  To the heart of any matter, Never trust  A French symbolist poet...

LONG-HAUL No water-bottles now –  to reduce single-use plastic, offset aviation fuel.  My gut’s like a wind-sock.  I panic for my passport, ask for...

Womankind In my Irish childhood, men were at work. Children and women had the run of the house. Street life flourished....

Emma Lee reviews Anne Casey's out of emptied cups. As well as her position of Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib. Emma Lee writes regular reviews for The Journal, The High Window Journal, London Grip and Sabotage and ad hoc reviews for other publications. Her collection “Ghosts in the Desert” is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing. A pamphlet “Mimicking a Snowdrop” was published by Thynks Press in 2014 and her full-length collection, “Yellow Torchlight and the Blues” has been published by Original Plus.

a-BIRTH-a-DAY by Alan Corkish Original Plus ISBN 9780995580299, 400pp, £14.95) After a discussion about writers’ block, Alan Corkish set himself the task of writing a poem...

The well-titled Fair Ground by Penny Sharman, is an exploration of childhood realised through an array of poetic forms, opens with the cascading free-verse...

Richard Lance Keeble reviews Bill Cushing's A Former Life. Richard, a regular reviewer for The Blue Nib is a Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln and Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University. He has written and edited 40 books on a wide range of media-related subjects. The chair of the Orwell Society, he is the joint editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and George Orwell Studies. In 2011, he gained a National Teaching Fellowship, the highest award for teachers in Higher Education in the UK and in 2014 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Journalism Education. In 2020, Routledge are to publish a collection of his essays under the title, Journalism Beyond Orwell.

The speaker in Ruth Stacy’s How to Wear Grunge (2018) is a struggling female poet who is heavy, hung-over and coming down. The poems...

Setareh Ebrahimi is the most sensual of writers. To enter her world is to navigate a region of heightened sensation and dizzying intimacy. The mood of In My Arms is breathless, deathless, hushed, brimming with imagery that engages and intoxicates the senses.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio reviews David Cooke's Reel To Reel for The Blue Nib. Carla moved to England (Lancashire then Surrey) in 2007 from Rome (Italy) and started attending creative writing courses. She obtained a Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. Her work was published in Shipwrights (an online Swedish Review), Purple Patch, First Edition magazine, Northern Life, audio Flax Anthologies: Vanishing Act (Flax 020), Flash Mob (Flax 026), Cake, the Beautiful Dragons Anthologies Heavenly Bodies and My Dear Watson, London Grip, Lighthouse, South and Poetry News. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011 and won the First Prize of the John Dryden Translation Competition 2016. The prize was awarded for translation of some poems by Eugenio Montale that Keith Lander and Carla co-translated. She publishes recipes, travel journals and opinions on her blog: carlascarano.blogspot.co.uk/ She is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading.

Ali Whitelock’s, and my heart crumples like a coke can reviewed by Ada Wofford. Along with being a Contributing Editor to the Blue Nib, Ada Wofford is bravely avoiding her inevitable 9-5 enslavement by studying library science at UW-Madison. She holds a BA in English literature and has been published in number of journals.

Raymond Antrobus, The Perseverance reviewed by Richard Lance Keeble for The Blue Nib. Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln and Visiting Professor at Liverpool Hope University. He has written and edited 40 books on a wide range of media-related subjects. The chair of the Orwell Society, he is the joint editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and George Orwell Studies. In 2011, he gained a National Teaching Fellowship, the highest award for teachers in Higher Education in the UK and in 2014 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Journalism Education. In 2020, Routledge are to publish a collection of his essays under the title, Journalism Beyond Orwell.

PLATO AND THE PEPSI CHALLENGE Plato frowns up at me from the pages of a dusty old textbook I’m reading. He looks the...

Meghan Purvis's translation of Beowulf was published in 2013 and won the 2011 Times Stephen Spender Prize for literary translation.

Guinotte Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in Resume Speed, Kansas.

Dorie LaRue is the author of two novels, three chapbooks of poetry, a full-length collection of poetry.

Bhodi Tims' The Acoustic Properties of Ancient People was published by Finishing Line Press.

John Patrick Robbins . Is the editor of both The Rye Whiskey Review and Under The Bleachers .

George Franklin's Traveling for No Good Reason was the winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition in 2018

Stephen Schwei is a Houston poet with Wisconsin roots, published in Wax Poetry & Art, Beneath the Rainbow, Hidden Constellation, Borfski Press, and the New Reader Magazine.

Isobel Cunningham's poetry has appeared in Rat's Ass Review, The Lake and Silver Birch Literary Review.

Combustion This Virginia heat is killing me.           90° and things begin to simmer.          91° and things get hazy. I stand...