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1. Schadenfreüde
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View original post 359 more words
My proof copy of my new collection, ‘some time we are heroes’ has arrived. It will be available on the Corrupt Press web page in September and I shall be getting a few copies for scribbling in and sending as well. Remember that postage from Spain isn’t cheap so, unless you really want that scribble or live in Spain, you should get it from The Corrupt Press. All my thanks to my editor, Dylan Harris, to Helen Ivory, George Szirtes and Jerome Rothenberg for saying such good things about it for the cover and to Nick Cooke and David Pollard for commenting on an early draft. Thanks also to Jan Stead for the cover painting.
Here’s the link to The Corrupt Press web page:
http://www.corruptpress.com/books/stwah.shtml
This is what some rather good people and brilliant poets have had to say about it:
US Trade, 81pp, €15, October 2018
ISBN 979-10-90394-58-2
The cover image is by Jan Stead
Reuben Woolley’s some time we are heroes traces the frayed relationship between two people in terms of a despairing yet lyrical crisis. Images of water, dancing, drinking and singing run through the book in poems whose lines shift nervously to produce a kind of sharp–edged jazz that touches both nerve and heart.
George Szirtes
John and Mary, whose trials began in children’s post–war picture books, are pitched into existential tribulations in a dystopian universe, akin to Popa’s. These poems occupy the worlds of both myth and physics with flashes of folk–surrealism. Woolley’s language is spare, his syntax and word–choice paint an off–kilter logic. His use of white space allows the poems, and their imaginative journeys, to perform themselves on the page.
Helen Ivory
In a line with our most ambitious striving for a new poetry and poetics, Woolley’s poems are both innovative in their means and open to the ruptures & struggles of our time that have broken apart the stories & myths that once held our world together — or that purported to do so. The results here are unique to his own special view of history & masterfully compelling.
Jerome Rothenberg
for Antwon Rose (d. 19 June 2018, 17 y.o., Allegheny County, PA)
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because they are prone 383 children lie//stand//fall
little limbs misshaped wide, their colors,
their pores pressed between layers of digital fungus
a trap set by sticky fingers
exposed, their pixel skins breathe
383 children birthed to operation Broken Heart
……………may inhale beyond the pages, believe
lizards trickle fairy tales tears, while they bleed
from clefts of torn innocence.
ii.
sweet children:
you are not alone.………you, 383, you have been found, but
others cry compressed air into ribs//into throats clamped//voices
enslaved in virtual silence.
to the seeming endless scream on the screen:
the web vibrates with searching — your mouths
shake sternums and clavicles, blow bony cacophony
into trade winds that grasp and claw.
iii.
a child’s rain
gathers between small scapular curves,
nestles into the indents where shame
might hang elastic sputum memories of fat lips and thin lips,
hide the blisters of chapped hands who brand…
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she wore seven syllables
on the back of her chic coat.
I really don’t care. Do u?
here are seven more for her:
there is no soul in your eyes.
and seven more just for her:
all children need their mothers.
sneaking into the city Prometheus
late again and so close to Juneteenth
time stops framing a lit up sky
not shunting burning coals
to Molls Myre above Dixon Blazes
ancient master blacksmith’s sit with Charles
and Margaret fire-placed in perfect
swinging low clouds like Gods
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and Goddesses muse over theft fuelling
fine fire and art no cupids angels frolicking
or gossiping about who Jupiter’s off shagging
when you really need him to be angry
as thunder to bring rain
..
below in the shadows a fiddling fiddler
offers flamed serenades silent rhymes
of night and day cracking structures snapping-hissing
popping sonatas paid in grounded
capped coins on concrete croons aromatic
fiery-smoking haar-filling
blanketed-brassy-breathy tinny red notes
A Mother’s Sacrifice wraps
itself around Glasgow mourning
..
and Scottish MSP’s refused to parlay
parliaments anti-democratic jiggery-pokery
devolution walked out its metal on worlds stage
allying together against rape clauses for…
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It is not the skinwalkers.
They were always from a place of evil.
It is not the appalled.
They will always object in the face of evil.
It is the every day spoken thoughts
of those who say the caged babies deserve it,
their self-righteous cruelty
crossing all lines in ultra high definition.
Land of the free you stand naked.
The border is broken. America is broken,
and no walls will ever save
the cracked conscience of your nation.
The armholes are crusty salt damaged
the once plump body casing
sags, shows how it lifted
against the waves
and it smells
when I go to the shore
resting on the pebbles of my home
I find them, not one but many
imported from far away
no price tags
I see the movement, orange flashes
out to sea washed to the beach
weighted with a load
a cargo no one wants to accept
dead or alive
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These children need a lullaby
with soft and gentle petals wiping the dew
drops from their foreheads.
Crockery bones encased in ceramic skin
porcelain fingers grasp for tenderness
and are met with the rasp of metal scrapes.
When poetry is beautiful
These children’s cries are as real
as the richness of images it conjures –
Firework lights of bright flowers meeting joy
fill the sky and rain down like bullets.
Piercing screams and skin the same.
These children don’t need an anthem.
These children need a lullaby.
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Bethan Rees is from Swindon, England, though is originally from Neath, Wales. She works full-time in admin and also studies an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. She hopes to use this in the future to be a “less silent” poet! You’ll usually find her clinging to any spare time she has by napping with her super supportive partner and ancient…
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