News

My visual poem pang has been published as part of MAINTENANT 15: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Poetry.

I actually created pang by accident while trying to scan in a collage of torn text and acrylic paint. I must have had the wrong settings on because instead of an image of what I had scanned, the output was compiled of strangely written text and oddly cropped image fragments scattered across a Word document. Because I was scanning it in my university library at 2am so that I could send it to my lecturer before our meeting, I didn’t initially appreciate the visual aspects so much, but out of a poorly managed time-pressure setting, on second glance I actually really liked it.

Even now it’s one of my favourite things I’ve created, and it was a complete accident. It’s had a lot of trouble finding a home, but three years later and here we are.

The publisher is based in New York and have noted that there are currently further hurdles shipping to the UK than previously, but I’m excited to see how it looks in print.

MAINTENANT 15 is available to purchase here from Three Rooms Press, or from other non-Amazoŋ websites.

I received the most wonderful email from Crossing Lines editor Aaron Kent this afternoon that the anthology has been reviewed in The Guardian! Mainstream media has a tendency to overlook smaller independent publishers, so it’s really wonderful to see a Broken Sleep Books publication highlighted on such a large platform.

The review begins:

“what els coalt enticed me to this / desolate country/ ?”, begins Yvonne Litschel’s poem “historical inaccuracy”

And concludes:

Much is lost, but much is preserved and vindicated in this welcome anthology.

It feels slightly self-indulgent to only include the portion of the review mentioning my own writing, but it is not a particularly long review and so I don’t want to include too much of it here.

The review was written by Aingeal Clare and published as part of The best recent poetry – review roundup, which can be read in full here.

My poems historical inaccuracy, veer, and We do not discuss the origin of foxes have been published as part of Crossing Lines: an anthology of immigrant poetry from Broken Sleep Books.

what els coult enticed me to this
desolate country /?

The there strange is whole
but takes much new force
by suffering listed and allows so.

On what part are you pigeon?
I line up my breadcrumbs
to foxfollow nomadic.

I’ve written about it before but this anthology really means a lot to me. My poem historical inaccuracy is also the opening poem in the book which is a genuine honour.

From the description:

Crossing Lines features a variety of poets writing about immigration, it shows how the physical and metaphorical borders of civilisation have shifted over time and how some persist. The most powerful sentiment in Crossing Lines is one of community, it is an anthology which takes delight in the shared complexity of human experience, celebrating what makes us who we are, gathered together in the welcoming arms of poetry.

The anthology is available for purchase from the Broken Sleep Books website here.

My poem floral mimicry subtypes in humans has been published as part of the Rewilding anthology. I usually post a verse though given the visual aspect I’ve cropped one instead:

Transcription:
printed shirts : aggressive / mimicry, / [predator] depicting something harmless, / camarades in the glasshouse / the sharpest contrast, smooth edges, soft / colours foraging success

This was one of the times when I did proper research before writing something. In simple terms floral mimicry is where a plant has evolved to resemble another organism, either to attract and detract attention from itself, much like animals and insects do. So I kind of anthropomorphised the different types and divided them along a predator/prey route involving a floral shirt and a pair of shears.

This is one of the rare times where someone’s reviewed something I’m in or have done, so I’m including that here because it makes me happy. Andrea Mason on Twitter writes “ephemeral poem ‘floral mimicry subtypes in humans’ narrates a nervous dance – hand-written over shadowy botanical illustration”, and in Susie Campbell’s review of the anthology for Poets for the Planet, she writes that “‘floral mimicry subtypes in humans’ breaks down the opposition of flower shapes and letter shapes”–and in both cases they have written more about the many other wonderful pieces in the anthology so do have a look at both the thread and the article for an idea of the other work featured.

The volume was published by Crested Tit Collective, and edited by Briony Hughes; I’ve written before about how much I adore the group in a previous post.

The book is not currently available for purchase directly from Crested Tit, but it is available here from Blackwell’s.

My poem 懐 ( なつ ) かしい ｓｈｏｅｂｏｘ 二 (nostalgia shoebox) 二 has been published as part of issue 8 of ctrl+v in three parts.

I’ll include the one of them below:

“Scattered ephemera from a trip to Japan five years ago, accompanied by fragments of letters from a monk. A bittersweet escapism in a time when we are unable to travel, but with the promise that such things will be possible again one day.”

The piece was originally created in a very long portrait format, but the editors reached out to me to ask if it would be okay to reformat it so that it would work better in the landscape format of their magazine. I added “二” to the title as a result of this, the kanji for two denoting a second version, and also because of it being visually horizontal to reflect the changing format.

The entire issue is able to be scrolled through here.