News

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.

My poem white sheet (short exposure time) has been published in Pink Plastic House.

the shadow of a girl ~ begins to take
shape ~ in the stereoscope

Written in response to examples of spirit photography featured as part of the Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic exhibition held at the Wellcome Museum in London in 2019.

I was genuinely overjoyed to have a poem accepted to Pink Plastic House as I love the concept behind the journal and really admire the work Kristin Garth puts into the visual aspects. She even created a new room for my poem, the darkroom, with its own picture and everything!

The poem is able to be read in full here — as poems are published on a rolling basis it will make its way down the page, so you’ll need to search my name to find it, or use this image link instead.