find a poet

Hear poet Damien B Donnelly read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Damien B Donnelly wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet After 25 years as a pattern maker in the fashion industry, Damien B Donnelly is now Head of Programming at the Irish Writers Centre. His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, and he's the author of two pamphlets and two collections – most recent of which is Back from Away . Genial host of popular long-running poetry podcast Eat the Storms , he's also editor-in-chief of its sister title, The Storms : a printed journal of poetry, prose and visual art . the poems The Retreat, Early On 00:00 / 01:26 First day of school, first glimpse of what it’s like to be eaten, slowly. There is no room for insecurity in the playground. You must learn this quickly but no one will tell you this until it is too late. There are beasts in the jungle of the yard, hungry to swallow up all the others haven’t learned has value. By lunchtime, you will have taught yourself to remove pieces in order to preserve. As poet, I start with the mouth, in order to hone words. By the second day, wear only one eyebrow, drop the left eye below the right, remove both ears – anything that can be a hook or can hear. Paint yourself with the yoke of a stale egg, banish any hint of perfection, too young to know you’ll never be able to reclaim this upon release. Hook After Sun in an Empty Room by Edward Hopper (1963) 00:00 / 01:24 He locked the door, after she left, after that time she never spoke of but the disappearance of her scent from the sheets in the days that followed, twisted itself around the truth of her no return. He locked the bedroom door, hoping to catch her shadow, particles of skin that had fallen, a droplet or two of sweat cycle saliva or one of the many tears he knew she’d expelled in the dark behind his back after he’d cum & she, while in situ, appeared to depart. He spied, at times, through the keyhole, how the outside light slipped in, how it cast a door upon solid wall from the shut window and he imagined her frame, unfading into focus, coming back for things she’d left behind like the ring that he hoped would hook. In the End, Light Filters Down 00:00 / 01:54 to a point beyond projection and on the side lines; all we sidelined mother father friend, the things we took and the time that was taken from us that we could never take back. There were tracks but this desert had no desire to be soiled, swept away all we had scuffed. We prayed but for Gods’ sake nothing was permanent. We were building blocks in others' hands we didn’t see growing tired whose tongues never knew the taste of our own thoughts which, like flames, were only bound to ash. When the light fell it was sand, not sky, we are corroded from birth like the coast not destined to the constellations – not plough nor star. We formed words fucked words flung words but the language was never ours to comprehend. We were bits, in boxes yokes – scrambling to be something other for someone else. In the end, all we leave is a howl a haunting to rattle through a space that never really held us in place. Publishing credits The Retreat, Early On / In the End, Light Filters Down: exclusive first publication by iamb Hook: Fevers of the Mind (Apr 13th 2022)

Hear poet Emily Cotterill read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emily Cotterill wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Emily Cotterill is a Cardiff-based poet originally from Alfreton in Derbyshire. Her pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants was part of Carol Ann Duffy’s Laurate’s Choice selection. Emily has been published in a variety of print and online publications, including Poetry Wales, The North and The Waxed Lemon. She's currently working on a first full collection about celebrity, storytelling and pop culture. the poems Slag 00:00 / 01:12 I have loved coal, like a teenage girl loves an older guitarist with a rough black smudge of eyeliner. I have built my life on it, screamed down decades for it, COAL NOT DOLE – bared my soul for it, but old women gossip about the pit. I know the world has had enough of it. Coal – with its head full of history, strong arms, filthy engines, heavy, the small town sex of it. Broken bodies, white knuckle wives, the silence of canaries – has risen from slag heaps and pit heads to thick air spluttering into anyone born late with an old miner's lungs. I have loved coal but recently, when I sit in the fresh place built on the scar of my grandfather’s pit, I have loved birdsong, greenspace, the safety and hope of it – wind turbines, rising white beacons, sharp armed, slicing clean paths to a future. The Greatest Punk Album In The World Ever (Disc 2) 00:00 / 00:44 I am consciously, consciously picking up women: to carry in my pockets, to throw at rough walls in moments when something might make them stick. I have lined my back teeth with Viv Albertine, replaced my extremities with Patti Smith. I have built a soft curve around a sad razor, there’s blood in my mouth that’s familiar. I do the things men do, just better. I have swapped my memories for the future, but when I whimper, hear Debbie Harry scream. The Cheeseburger Love Song 00:00 / 01:26 At the window is a woman you have loved despite your diet, gorged on the look of her with the guiltiest parts of hunger. Her deft hands dance on the wax wrap paper, forearms flecked with a hundred spitting oil scars. The fast food tattoo. She is always here, and you suppose that she remembers you, from her un-kissed acne years and all the warm paper bags between. You, who would surrender your torso to the drive-thru window, to take her by the faded polo-shirt collar and to have her. Her lips would have the cherry pink taste of market stall gloss, her mouth drenched in free fills of fountain cola and the thing is, she has seen you, all your faces in those repeated flash cars. She could make you in a minute. Plunge your heart and her hand into the deep fat, feel nothing. You are ruined, crisp and bubbling. She scrunches your wrapping, she throws you away. Publishing credits Slag: A Change of Climate (Illingworth) The Greatest Punk Album In The World Ever (Disc 2): exclusive first publication by iamb The Cheeseburger Love Song: The Day of the Flying Ants (Smith|Doorstop)

Hear poet Wren Wood read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wren Wood wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Wren Wood, a mother, poet and nature educator/connection specialist from London, writes imagistic and constrained poetry to document life’s small, often overlooked moments. She also loves reworking old myths in contemporary settings. Having studied for her BA in Creative Writing at Roehampton University, Wren is now undertaking Bardic training. She's had work published by the Land Workers Alliance, as well as in several titles from Black Bough Poetry. After years of scribbling poems in snatched moments, Wren is now going through her piles of poetry to pick out the best for her debut pamphlet and collection. the poems Couplet 00:00 / 00:31 Held by spider-silk to the thin-twigged edges of the redbark cherry, a couplet of nests sit snow-cloaked and silent, on this, our shortest day – awaiting the return of the lengthening light, of pink blossom riots, the renewal of leaves, and with it all, their goldfinch charm. Lutein 00:00 / 00:17 My son’s tousled hair echoes the lutein gold strands of pollen-heavy catkins in the hazel copse, gleaming in winter sunlight. A Summation of Wonder 00:00 / 04:35 If it is claimed by those around – or within – you, that you are too much or at times, not yet enough; in your retreat to smallness Dear Heart, please re-call that the iron in your blood, in nettles that burn, the core of this blessed Earth, forged in a collapsing star. As you unravel, re-know how your skin was once carbon held in the sprawling roots of ancient pines that flourished after the ice. As panic threatens to swell and wash away all, your sweat works to cool and calm, and retreats to the streams of vapour stored as clouds. While you perspire droplets born of the oceans, they rise to join the transpired outbreaths of pink hawthorns, and violet heartsease, blown across the skies to mountains to fall as snow. And there, your worry – and mine – is tended until the weight of itself shakes free. I note your nails are worn short through teeth and wrought-thoughts. One day, when we are long done, this keratin you gift with spit – puh! – back to the land, will form a rhino’s horn, the fur of wolves, feathers of iridescence, turtle-shells, and the scales of adders that bask in the sun. Friend, the calcium and phosphorus in your bones were once bound in chalk: cliffs of creatures of the seas. Who before they sank into the pale sediment, kept company with the small exhalations of algae, and reptile giants, who became the birds you now marvel at as we shelter from the rain and watch in awe-fear as they twist across the sky, teasing the storm clouds to charge and s t r i k e ! Streaks of lightning split the atmosphere on repeat; the protons beneath your feet calling to the ground vivid electricity. Clouds we gazed into forms that fine day in July, do you remember? Now invoking air’s atoms to white-heat incandescence. And calls nitrogen into blue luminescence. That then falls, torn from within, clutched by a current of rain forcing you to flinch as it thuds against the soil merging with the work of microbes smaller than we can perceive so plants may feast, then die to nourish you and so tend to your thriving. Delivering that nitrogen, once of the stars then sky then soil to scaffold your DNA. And in the quiet of this night, we look for her, – dear Grandmother Moon – who herself cannot be full without her retreat into the deep dark. And in her new-born weeks, she gazes upon the tide of distant starlight that made her. We too. And speak of being loved in imperfect manners by those hearts who have forgotten their own magnitude, while we search out past-stars; exploded into fractions of themselves. Yet their light still edges near; longing to wise-look upon their young descendants: drifting, lingering in an illuminated brilliance of limerence at the thought of All: human, and more-than-we in multiple, ongoing forms. My friend, please re-call in your retreat to smallness: you’re Light’s memory – a fingerprint of the stars. A summation of wonder. * * * * * Publishing credits Couplet: Christmas & Winter Edition Vol. 3 (Black Bough Poetry) Lutein: Christmas & Winter Edition Vol. 2 (Black Bough Poetry) A Summation of Wonder: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Scarlett Ward Bennett read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Scarlett Ward Bennett wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Scarlett Ward Bennett is a West Midlands poet whose debut collection ache – published by Verve Poetry Press in 2019 – has been nominated for a 2020 Forward Poetry Prize. She was nominated for Best Spoken Word Performer in the 2019 Saboteur Awards, and came third in the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Prize judged by Roy McFarlane. Scarlett runs several poetry workshops, and hosts the 'Versification' poetry evening in Cannock. A self-confessed hedgehog lady, she volunteers for West Midlands Hedgehog Rescue. the poems Culling Season 00:00 / 00:44 Somewhere in a town that is best known for how deep it has dug underneath itself, where the addresses are earthy like “May Dene” and “Old Fallow”, and roads fling themselves lethargically around woodland bends, a pot hole rips the gut out of an exhaust on an accelerating Ford with all the viciousness of antlers on bark. After all, it is rutting season, and it’s all I can think of lately; feuding stags butting skulls, concrete tearing out metal piping, and the way my neighbour boasted to me this morning of the fawn he shot through the eye socket. We’re going to have to talk about it at some point 00:00 / 00:46 aren’t we? Except, I don’t want to. Can’t instead we talk of dandelion manes; the way they nose their way through cracks in the pavement, only to be scattered in infinite directions when kicked violently enough, scorned spores spiraling; frantic heads of fine-spun lace dizzying themselves away, as though away is the only place far enough from that damned kicking boot. Can we focus on the flowers and not think of anything else – not of how I ran home to my mum’s house, shame dampening the crotch of my underwear, and not of the beads from my snapped bracelet that I clutched tightly in my fist. What Is True Of Spring 00:00 / 00:54 is true also of ourselves. Learn from her; how she unfurls her flowered fists, waits for buds to burst from the end of branches, like beading blood on kneecaps, or lacquer slicked at the end of knuckled hands. Heal from your wounds womb first; blood is no omen of death, but of the pact we make with life. Even fossils dream of dawn, brittle from singing themselves hoarse clinking away under all that soil like forgotten coins in a deep pocket waiting to be unearthed. What if none of us ever stopped singing, the same way an oak remembers its notes of green once April comes back around no matter how much white winter had buried it in? Publishing credits All poems: ache (Verve Poetry Press)

Hear poet Kim Harvey read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kim Harvey wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Kim Harvey is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, 3Elements Review, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 2019, and placed third in the Barren Press Poetry Contest in the same year. the poems Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life 00:00 / 02:23 Are you now or have you ever been considered an invasive species? How long can you survive in the desert without water? Have you ever lied to the U.S. government? Are you lying now? You let me know if you need something to drink. To what fungi have you been exposed? Are you infectious? Do you carry contagions? Are you viable? How much attention do you require? Are you wild? Tell me why you are afraid of fire. What is your country of origin? Do you seek the shade of others? Do you plan to uproot established trees? How far back can you trace your seed? Are you a clone? Are you barren? Are you a weed? Will you reproduce incessantly and choke the perennials? Why were you harmed? When were you harmed? So you were witness to a violence. Are you damaged at the cellular level? Under what conditions will you wilt or wither? How did you escape? And where have you been since? On whom or what do you depend? Are you a hallucinogen? Are you medicinal? Are you lethal to domestic animals or people? Can you be bought and sold? Are you illegal? And the Plant Answers Back [Redacted]: (muffled, inaudible) …my sister was burned part of me died too I don’t know how I got out I will tell you I flew I was a samara on the wind I can still feel her like a phantom limb [ ] I could [ ] smell her [ ] singed skin [ ] raining down around me [ -------- ] Even now I hear her howling Light & Shadow ‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’ ~ Vincent Van Gogh ~ 00:00 / 02:17 A hawk takes a snake in its talons, flies to the top of the trees, aspens I think, above the canyon. Can we agree the snake is dead now? Your words, shards from a broken vase I turn over in my hands, crush fine like millet into the fallen leaves. Stop brooding on the form of things. Think of Van Gogh. Modest blue room. Towel hung on a nail by the door, bowl and pitcher, water if you’re thirsty – absinthe green spilling in through paned glass like a sickness. Loss, a lamp lit long ago. Wasn’t it you who told me blue was the last color to be named in every language? Show me again in moonlight the hollows of you – the places where your body starts and stops. I remember you told me about Van Gogh, how he ate yellow paint to try to get the light inside him. How when he died his body was laid out alongside easels and brushes in a room full of yellow dahlias and sunflowers. How, in the end, it wasn’t just the light he was after. What he wanted was to drink turpentine, to choke on black cadmium and lead. What he really wanted was to die eating his paints, breathing them in, every color, all of them – orange, sienna, crimson, ochre, gypsum, lapis, gold, cobalt blue. Winter Solstice Incantation 00:00 / 01:00 Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black. This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed, what you were to me and a door slammed shut between this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone. Publishing credits Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life: Poets Reading the News (September 14th 2019) Light & Shadow: The Comstock Review (Fall/Winter 2019) – winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest 2019 Winter Solstice Incantation: Black Bough Poetry Christmas / Winter Edition 2019 (Black Bough Poetry)

Hear poet Jay Whittaker read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jay Whittaker wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Jay Whittaker is an Edinburgh-based poet who grew up in Devon and Nottingham. She's published two collections to date: Sweet Anaesthetist and Wristwatch – the latter chosen as Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2018 in the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Jay's widely published in journals that include The North , Butcher’s Dog and The Rialto , and has recently had work accepted by The Poetry Review . Two of her poems appear in Bloodaxe Books' anthology, Staying Human . the poems Egg case 00:00 / 05:33 My left ovary is smothered in seven centimetres of cyst. A risk to be reduced. ~ A beachcombed husk in my palm, multiple crumpled chambers deflated and dried, bereft of hatched whelks. A self-contained nodule of nothing, pod of naught. ~ Wobbling on a wooden stool in the school biology lab, I clench my sharpened pencil, transcribe the handbag and curved horns into my exercise book. I will keep practising until fluent, ready to reproduce constituent parts in cartoonish simplicity – a handbag and curved horns. I lay my transparent ruler across the paper and draw straight lines, and label (best handwriting): Ovaries, Ampulla, Endometrium, Fallopian Tubes. But I don’t know them. Not viscerally. ~ And how much less interesting than the febrile atmosphere in the school hall on the day one hundred twelve-year-olds are herded in to watch the childbirth video . At the crowning, commotion at the front. The boy who faints will be taunted for years. ~ Imagine: my abdomen crammed with congealed jelly babies. ~ Sometimes I looked up and my mother was watching me, as though wondering what she’d done. ~ My mother told me: It was the bloody ants’ fault. I was pregnant with you. Your father was away. You know how I hate ants in the house. ~ I am possible. ~ Inexorable ant-march across a kitchen floor. No one to talk her down or reassure. Scrubbing. Safe to use ant powder inside when pregnant? Not sure. Read and reread the packet. Relentless. Ants keep marching. Need to empty the cupboard under counter anyway, in case the ants find it, find the flour and sugar inside. Visions of a never-ending ant army carrying their sugar lumps aloft, victorious, back to their queen. Lifting and bending – getting up and down – panicking about ants and – wet in her knickers – a pooling. Blood – I am choosing A punishment for leaving it so late to have a child. For thinking, in their cleverness, with their science, they were above this. The thought of her mother’s told-you-so triumph. ~ The GP said his wife took these tablets too; I would never have taken anything when I was pregnant, I even stopped smoking, I was so careful but I thought I was miscarrying — A risk reduced. I am possible. ~ Alone in bed, sleepless, praying to the god her husband denies. ~ She tells me when I am eighteen, have left home for a university ninety miles north, It was in the Sunday Times a few years after you were born. All the cancers in the daughters are at puberty; you’re safe. She tells me now because of course maybe you shouldn’t go on the pill . I am already on the pill. She tells me in such a way that makes it clear we won’t talk about it again. ~ A hunt for the unknown, the untold, the unnamed. In the Science Library, I turn the handle on a microfilm reader, not too fast (nausea). Oestrogen. Estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol. Diethylstilboestrol. Stilbestrol. DES. Leading me to the long shelves of Index Medicus , metres of cloth-bound volumes, to rifle Bible-thin paper. I school myself in libraries, their tools, fiche readers, bibliographies, catalogues, all they contain. All that was withheld. All that was never vocalised. All the swallowed words. ~ My inheritance: Great grandfather – dies of sarcoma. Grandmother – dies of breast cancer. Mother – exposure to DES in pregnancy. Two breast cancers. Dies of ovarian cancer. Me – exposure to DES in utero . One breast cancer (and counting). I am choosing. ~ Buried deep in my pelvis and scheduled for excision: tissue, but more than tissue. My snail shells, my coiled snakes. Mysterious, seen on scans, analysed by faceless medics, discussed in front of me in medical language by my partner and my consultant, doctor to doctor – I have no clue, really. I am excising a possibility. ~ Absence is a poke of pain when I bend forward too quickly, a stabbing gyroscope, a whirligig of knife-ache when I lie on my left side. ~ A risk reduced. From the 1940s till the early 1970s, synthetic oestrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) was given to at least 300,000 UK women whom doctors believed were at increased risk of miscarriage. A clinical study in 1953 found DES did nothing to reduce such risk, yet it was administered until 1971 – when it was discovered that daughters of women given the drug were at heightened risk of rare vaginal/cervical cancers. Later research linked DES to greater risk of breast cancer in both mothers and daughters. Clearly something was up 00:00 / 00:42 Every time I drove, plink and ricochet, stones on metal like popcorn in a lidded pan. I blamed the untarmacked track, recent resurfacing on the main road – until a warning light came on – under the bonnet, rats had stashed birdseed in every crevice, nestled pebbles into crannies, built a cairn of stones on the engine. The shock of rat shit on the camshaft. Chewed wires betrayed them, building a haven of warmth and food in the heart of a machine I thought was mine. Canopy (Day 20: First chemo cycle) 00:00 / 00:46 Do tree tips tingle, niggle like my scalp? Most people’s hair (I’m told) comes out on day eighteen. White hairs work loose first, waft down. This late summer evening, my scarfed skull as bald and vulnerable as a fledgling’s, I stand under the row of sycamore, my neck sore from looking up to the abundance of leaves. Whatever happens to me, the earth is turning. At the same hour in winter, haven’t I stood in this very spot, watching bare branches implore the sky for light? Publishing credits Egg case: Sweet Anaesthetist (Cinnamon Press) Clearly something was up: The Rialto (Issue 97) Canopy:Wristwatch (Cinnamon Press)

Hear poet Rachael Clyne read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachael Clyne wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Rachael Clyne (she/her) has been published in journals including Tears in the Fence , Shearsman , The Rialto , Lighthouse and Ink Sweat & Tears . She's also had work anthologised in #MeToo: A Women's Poetry Anthology , Queer Writing for a Brave New World and Rebel Talk: Poems from the Climate Emergency . Her prize-winning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree , addresses our broken connection with nature – while her pamphlet, Girl Golem , explores her Jewish migrant heritage and sense of otherness. the poems Girl Golem 00:00 / 01:27 The night they blew life into her, she clung bat-like to the womb-wall. A girl golem, a late bonus, before the final egg dropped. She divided, multiplied, her hand-buds bloomed; her tail vanished into its coccyx and the lub-dub of her existence was bigger than her nascent head. She was made as a keep-watch, in case new nasties tried to take them away. The family called her chotchkele , their little cnadle , said she helped to make up for lost numbers – as if she could compensate for millions. With X-ray eyes, she saw she was trapped in a home for the deaf and blind, watched them blunder into each other’s neuroses. Her task, to hold up their world, be their assimilation ticket, find a nice boy and mazel tov – grandchildren! But she was a hotchpotch golem, a schmutter garment that would never fit, trying to find answers without a handbook. When she turned eighteen, she walked away, went in search of her own kind, tore their god from her mouth. The golem legend is of a man made from clay and Kabbalistic spells to protect Jews from persecution. Rewilding the Body Based on Isobella Tree’s account of rewilding Knepp House Farm 00:00 / 01:06 The ribs of my country jut, its dreams gutted, hopes tilled to exhaustion. Fault lines exposed by monoculture expectation, by intensively farmed ambition. Let thistle stitch my wounds, as painted-lady caterpillars feast on the prickles. Let pigs unzip my paths with cracks for bastard toadflax and meadow-clary. Let ragwort flourish as one hundred and seventy-seven insect species thrive on its bad reputation. Let longhorn cattle tramp hoof-print pools for fairy shrimp, water crowfoot, stonewort. And one moonlit night – nightingales will return to fill my country with their song. Plague Times 00:00 / 03:35 At Passover, we dipped a finger into our wine. We splashed a drop, for each plague named. We did not rejoice. I BLOOD On hands, in every breath, in gullet and gizzard, in belly of whale, from every littered shore, we the seas incarnadine. II FROGS After ice-melt, I pulled three frogs, bloated and stinking, from the pond. Can we afford to lose them? Slugs will flourish in this unlikely spring. III FLIES Feast on our flesh, they wriggle their fatted way, before winging to offshore havens, leaving us a humanless world. IV WILD BEASTS In Chernobyl, wolf-law rules empty dachas, factories. Bears refill forests. Here, Adonis Blue butterflies will thrive on Salisbury Plain. Rats and dogs will shelter in car shells. V CATTLE PLAGUE Play-barns with swings and muzak, and no place for chickens. Carousel feed-troughs rotate past cattle. Pigs gaze through gratings at a crack of sky. VI BOILS This winter virus has no end. The people cough their way into summer. Vaccinations, rumoured to be toxic, do not help. An unreliable source blames chemtrails. VII HAIL First, snow, so deep. That night, rain. By morning the window – solid ice. On the ground, black ice, invisible. We could not step outside. Next day, hail thuds onto the roof. Hail, snow, a sound like falling corpses– these are surely plague times. VIII LOCUSTS Gobbling hoards turn Friday black, as they swarm through shopping malls, stampede for their white gods, trample one another for plasma screens. IX DARKNESS A firmament of LED glare and twinkle of red and white lights thread highways through the undarkened night. The only visible stars are on the ground. X DEATH OF FIRSTBORN Floods destroy the power station. Fish without scales, tumour-ridden, cover the ocean to its farthest coast. There will be no offspring. XI PARTING OF WAVES Red the ocean, gone the ice, gone coastline. No more trips to the seaside. No sandcastles. No fish to fry. No bargains to buy. No creatures to catch. No trees. No insects to bite. No birds to shoot. No property to buy. No planes to fly. No God to part the waves. Just burning bushes. Publishing credits Plague Times: Shearsman (Issue 121/122) Girl Golem: Tears in the Fence (No. 67) Rewilding the Body: Riggwelter (Issue 18) Author photo: © Jinny Fisher

Hear poet Lesley Curwen read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lesley Curwen wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Plymouth-based poet, broadcaster, sailor and winner of the inaugural Molecules Unlimited poetry competition , Lesley Curwen writes about loss in the natural world – loss she saw inflicted by the global capitalism she used to report on. Together with Jane R Rogers and Tahmina Maula, she collaborated on the pamphlet Invisible Continents . Lesley's solo work, Rescue Lines , was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in July 2024. A Wales Poetry Award finalist in 2022, Lesley has found homes for her poems with journals and publishers including Black Bough Poetry , Broken Sleep Books , After... , Atrium , Spelt Magazine , The Alchemy Spoon and Ice Floe Press . the poems Running free 00:00 / 00:59 rippled mane spits white beads sun gifts endless diamond flash on stippled flow sheets pulled iron taut a cloud-line shadows Plymouth slides south to Spain my boat tips and yaws I ride her like a gaucho rockinghorsebronco through seas finite but giant a cornflowerblue bling robe to cool a planet my boat and I plough through plastic, oil slicks, submarines shit, bodies, melted ice fleets of sardine, shark whale and cell-wide life in celebration, grief, what you will A parent never known 00:00 / 00:42 In the gym, mirrors meet at a dark seam where body is apprehended but face is half a line of flesh, a ghosting, nothing real. Impossible to see whose breath is misting glass. In this fashion, the unmet father/mother is present and concealed. The solid whole that lies beyond the join feels close, a step away, just missed. Faceless, the kin we lost and lose again. Ocean City 00:00 / 02:52 We are on the edge of the world. Always the draw of water’s tinselled margin, urgent roar. Tattered pigeons bleach bronze heads of mariners who left Mayflower steps flush with gold and hard tack. Spattered eyes look to ocean’s light its crooning, sweet unknown. Monuments to the infinite spivvery of seizing new worlds not new to inhabitants not worlds at all same planet, same air, same cursed seas. We are on the edge of everywhere at stone steps beyond pasty ‘n’ fudge shops decorated by a dozen plaques copperplate or fat capital. A toxic pink sprayed across the globe from here this nub and den of chancers, rogues astride their wooden barkys aching to leap over the edge. It is not the ocean’s fault. It skitters in morning sun without intent, tides swung by moon’s slide at gravity’s dictate. Blameless it sighs, waves rainbow-flashed by diesel meniscus sucking at particled air. No launches now from Mayflower steps though exploits persist. Three frigates anchored in the Sound, tankers hauling fossil juice, dark fin of nuclear sub. A multi-storied cruise ship squats the bay its orange shiplets bound for pirate shops. The ocean is not what it was. Neoprene swimmers lash arms through green soup herbed with heavy metals from dead mines fine solution of faeces from overflows swarms of plastic iotas rinsed and smashed by diurnal tides. In the dusty Minster clouds of purple fish swim sunlit glass. A creation window hurls scarlet atoms on cobalt sea. Harbourside, loud horns call. Another vessel docks in Plymouth’s endless back-and-forth. The swell licks iron ring in weathered stone, blurs a rusty edge. Publishing credits Running Free: Invisible Continents (Nine Pens Press) A parent never known / Ocean City: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet James Giddings read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. James Giddings wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Born in Johannesburg and now living in Sheffield in the north of England, James Giddings is the author of Everything is Scripted , published in 2016 by Templar Poetry. the poems Look inside 00:00 / 01:00 At the base of the back of my neck is the button you press to get a look inside. One firm push with your thumb and FWIP! my head pops back like the top of a kettle and a noise strikes the same tone as a microwave casserole when it’s cooked, a mushroom cloud of steam ballooning from the neck hole of my thin cigarette body. Once you’ve released all that hot air, take a peek, you’ll see there’s not much there: no gold elements, no dial tone of great intellect, just a feeling, as if staring down a deep ravine. There seems as if there’s no end to it, until you throw something down and a sound calls back from the bottom. There are versions of us in alternate universes 00:00 / 01:37 One where we’re partners on a buddy cop show who stand back-to-back with our guns raised as our theme tune swells to a crescendo and the screen detonates, our names exploding out of picture. Another where we bloom on trees like bright fruit and our lives are spent waiting for the great fall. Then there’s the one where I am your father and you are my son, and you are crying because you’re hungry and I am crying because I can’t get the car seat to bloody fit, but we stop, for a few seconds, each of us near silent when we catch the eyes of the other. One where we are giant glass shards reflecting. Another where we are bank robbers, our ears pressed against a safe door like expectant fathers listening for a heartbeat. Another where we wait in a long line for the entrance to Hell and both complain about how long it’s taking. And even though I know there are worse universes than ours, I can’t shake the one in which each night you tell me all the unextraordinary words you know like spam , hardcopy and telemarketer, then right before you leave, say a couple of extraordinary ones, which are only so because of how rarely I’ve heard you utter them in this world. No requests 00:00 / 01:55 I’m working on my vanishing act, an homage to my father. To learn more I attend a show where the magician starts by sawing a ladle in half. To further subvert the genre he pulls a hat out of a rabbit, places the rabbit on his head like a toupee and shaves it into oblivion with a set of clippers, leaving the cue ball of his bald head shining. Do the one where the father disappears and you bring him back on stage! I heckle, but he doesn’t do requests. Next he does a card trick entirely with birthday cards, which, in a feat of anti-gravity, levitates the heart in my chest. With love , one reads, then his signature, a single kiss. Impressed, I shout, do the one where you bring back the father! But he still doesn’t do requests. Next he stretches a ten pence piece leaving the Queen’s face visibly frustrated. Then he solves a Rubik’s cube by throwing it behind his back; it is so convincing and easy, I hope a policeman might hand him a murder case. I rise from my seat, plead, please do the one where you bring back the father! He gestures off-stage theatrically, magics up security and I’m escorted out through a plain grey door. No traps. No secret panels. I never got to see the big finish, whether he did the trick, but I waited anyway, checking every face that left the auditorium, hopeful he had pulled it off. Publishing credits Look Inside: exclusive first publication by iamb There Are versions of Us in Alternate Universes: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 2) No Requests: Poetry London (Issue 97)

Literary magazine iamb is an archive of contemporary poets reading their own poems. It's also a quarterly journal of contemporary poetry from around the world. 2020 one two three four 2021 five six seven eight 2022 nine ten eleven twelve 2023 thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen 2024 seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty 2025 twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four 2026 twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight Read and hear wave twenty-four find a poet A-Z about audition © 2020-26

Hear poet Nia Broomhall read poems for wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nia Broomhall wave 26 Summer 2026 back next the poet Nia Broomhall is an award-winning poet based in Farnham, Surrey. She holds an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is Poet in Residence at Painshill Park in Cobham. Currently co-Head of English at a comprehensive school, she has been teaching for almost 25 years. the poems Ice I 00:00 / 01:44 so we teach them there is more much more below the surface and we hand them masks though some are cracked and not everyone wants to look the water is so cold down there blind sharks two hundred years old move slow as thaw the ice stroking fractured shadows over their scarred and ceaseless skin their spines soft still lengthening year on slow year as glaciers creak and calve searchlight slow we keep one hand on the dark ice we descend unblinking our pulses oil water shifting in our ears there is more below the surface the surface gleams above us like a chandelier like salt fire in the blue dark look down we tell them there is more there is more sleeper sharks search search light slow Ice II 00:00 / 01:44 you should have heard the noise the stone made chirruping across the ice on the lake like a message through a wire clicking with starlings so suddenly there and lifted away in the white air fizzing like wings I searched for more stones to hear it again and again I can hear it like a voicemail I’ll play back sometimes when static days flicker on hot stone listening for the dots and dashes of swifts returning I’ll hear you again and your voices and replay your voices flicking home across that frozen lake Ice III 00:00 / 01:44 Today I want to write about ice. How things suspend in it. How light shines through it into the eyes of my son who has discovered he can capture this with a camera. How yesterday I held it up for him like a prism that burned my hands. How it blazed in the flash. But now the rain ticks on the window and a friend is dying in hospital and a sister slogs to the city for treatment that may delay this for her a little longer and in the place where he took the pictures there is only a small skin of water a dead leaf and a green one released from ice and no sign warm fingers ever held a thing. Publishing credits

looking for a poet?

looking for a poet?

wave thirteen spring 2023 Anila Arshad-Mehmood Anna Milan Ben Blench Courtenay Schembri Gray Dale Booton Darren J Beaney Di Slaney Emily Cotterill James McConachie Jude Marr Mary Ford Neal Michael Conley Rachel Deering Sam J Grudgings Stephanie Clare Smith back to top

wave ten summer 2022 Annick Yerem Bill Sutton Elisabeth Kelly Elizabeth M Castillo Emma Kemp Gerry Stewart Jay Whittaker Ken Cockburn Kitty Donnelly Michael McGill Penelope Shuttle Richard Jeffrey Newman Ruth Taaffe Shiksha S Dheda Simon Middleton back to top

wave eight winter 2021 Beth Brooke Catrice Greer Cora Dessalines Fiona Sampson Hilary Otto JC Niala Leeanne Quinn Lucy Holme Marcelle Newbold Natalie Crick Oliver Comins Peter Scalpello Robert Harper Suchi Govindarajan Zoe Brooks back to top

wave seven autumn 2021 Candradasa Charlotte Knight Clare Proctor Daljit Nagra Devon Marsh Giovanna MacKenna Harula Ladd Ivor Daniel Jenny Byrne Kara Knickerbocker Peter A Samuel Tongue Sue Finch Usha Kishore Ysella Sims back to top

wave three autumn 2020 Aaron Kent Amantine Brodeur Caleb Parkin Carrie Etter Colin Dardis Eleanor Holmes Eleanor Hooker Erik Kennedy Holly Singlehurst Jorie Graham Laura Wainwright Maria Taylor Marvin Thompson Polly Atkin Ricky Ray Roy Marshall Sascha Akhtar Victoria Kennefick Vismai Rao Zelda Chappel back to top

wave twenty-two summer 2025 Carl Alexandersson Charlotte Gann Fidel Hogan Walsh J A Lenton Julian Bishop Kate Jenkinson Katrina Naomi Kerry Trautman Loic Ekinga Mary Mulholland Patricia M Osborne Rishika Williams Samantha Terrell Sarah James Wren Wood back to top

wave sixteen winter 2023 Alan Buckley Conor Kelly Dorian Nightingale Faye Alexandra Rose Holly Peters Isra Hassan J-T Kelly JP Seabright Jen Feroze Jenny Wong Matthew Stewart Pascale Potvin Phil Vernon Rebecca Goss Sarah Connor back to top