Hear the poets of wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb read their poems for spring 2020. wave two spring 2020 Aki Schilz Angela T Carr Anna Saunders Claire Trévien Emma Page Georgia Hilton Helen Calcutt Jack B Bedell James Roome Jo Burns Maggie Smith Mat Riches Matthew M C Smith Neil Elder Paul Brookes Reshma Ruia Sarra Culleno Scarlett Ward Bennett Scott Elder Seanín Hughes

Hear the poets of wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb read their poems for winter 2023. 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

Hear the poets of wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb read their poems for autumn 2025. wave twenty-three autumn 2025 Barnaby Harsent Claire Orchard Eric T Racher Estelle Price Helen Laycock Hilary Sallick Hilary Watson Karan Chambers Kate Caoimhe Arthur Lysz Flo Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig Michael Burton Piero Toto Sarah Wallis Victoria Spires

Hear the poets of wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb read their poems for summer 2026. wave twenty-six summer 2026 Alex Smith Anna Maughan Caroline Stancer Clare Best Deborah Gaudin Elizabeth Osmond Frances Klein Francesca Leader Jonathon Medeiros Kate Vanhinsbergh Lauren Parker Rachel Burrows Robin Ince Victoria Moul Zain Rishi

Hear the poets of wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb read their poems for autumn 2024. wave nineteen autumn 2024 Christopher Arksey Corinna Board Frances Boyle Julie Stevens Kerry Darbishire Laura Theis Lewis Wyn Davies Louise Longson Marc Alan Di Martino Michele Grieve Nicholas McGaughey Oormila V Prahlad Rhona Greene Suyin Du Bois Tom Bailey

Hear the poets of wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb read their poems for summer 2022. 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

Hear poet Chloe Bancroft read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Chloe Bancroft wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Editor-in-Chief of Nine Pens Press, Chloe Bancroft lives in County Durham. She's published a full collection, Vanishing Point , as well as the pamphlets Impermanence and Knife Edge . Chloe also has a micro-pamphlet of wrestling poems, Kayfabe , which appeared in 2021. the poems Hermes gives a statement about why he agreed to abandon Dionysus 00:00 / 01:56 Well I’d seen what had happened to Semele/ burnt to a cinder/ like the bits you get in the tray at the bottom of a toaster/ so I knew he wasn’t messing about/ he had me scrape her up off the kitchen floor/ who was I to argue/ he spent the next hour sat at the table letting her dust fall through his fingers/ this is how I made the stars he said/ looking at particular specks/ wondering aloud what part of her body it had been/ put it on his tongue and shivered/ of course he said it wasn’t his fault/ that she had asked for it/ that he had got overexcited and had revealed himself too quickly/ I don’t know/ then he collapsed on the sofa/ blood everywhere/ the mad bastard had only gone and gouged a hole in his leg/ if you can you believe it/ there was a baby in there/ I could see its face pressed up against his skin/ you know how Ben Kingsley died in Slevin/ he hobbled around for weeks/ football injury he muttered when anyone asked/ he had me check on it every night/ disgusting/ his thigh blown up like a bee hive/ the baby squirming about like larvae/ Hera knew of course/ she was seething/ didn’t speak more than two words to him for months/ sat at the dinner table picking her teeth with a fork/ just staring at him/ the night he gave birth it just popped right out of his leg/ like when you get a mogwai wet/ he went down like a Brazilian centre forward/ howling/ I scooped it up just before Hera got there/ get rid of it he hissed/ I jumped out of the window/ walked around for ages/ ended up by the river/ I had no idea what to do/ I mean where do you dump the baby of a God on a Tuesday night. How a Guide to Winning the Royal Rumble is a Guide for Life 00:00 / 01:15 The first thing you need is a good slice of luck as to when you enter. Nothing good ever came from being the first one in. More people have walked on the moon than have won from the number one position, remember that. You have no friends, not here. They will boot you in the face and toss you out like yesterday’s trash. Skulking helps as does hiding under the ring. A bag of thumbtacks or a barbed wire bat are not illegal. Never run towards the ropes because someone will send you over them. Likewise never climb too high because there is always someone ready to push you off. If Kane arrives then you have already lost. Always walk down the ramp. Enthusiasm will only get you killed & playing to the crowd is usually a big mistake. Perhaps the best piece of advice I can give you is that if you do go over the top rope, hold on for dear life, fight and claw as you dangle over the precipice, because no one has ever been victorious when both their feet have touched the ground. Poem explains the mechanics of dry drowning 00:00 / 02:33 Someone sits next to me on the bus. I turn to look. She has long red hair and her eyes are wider than radar dishes. She rolls a sweet around her mouth like a roulette ball. A radiation blast of cherryade and Mademoiselle. It is Poem. Her arm presses tightly to mine. She is uncomfortably warm, as though she has run here quickly but she isn’t out of breath. She’s never cared about personal space and as she leans across to wipe the condensation from the window her hair covers my face like a spider’s web, like when Indiana Jones entered that cave in Raiders of the Lost Ark. She bangs on the window and swears at someone down on the street. As she moves back, she runs her hand across my cheeks, her fingers moist and cold. What are you writing about now saddo? She asks reaching for the notebook I have tried to fold into my lap. I push it down the side of the seat. She cackles loudly, like a magpie. I bet it’s the rain again, isn’t it? You and the fucking rain. It’s only water you know. Tell me how many poems have you written about car washes or sponge baths? She gobs on the window and we watch it run down. Why don’t you write about that? Did you know that 73% of the brain and heart are made of water? Now she is wearing glasses. Her hair tied tightly in a bun. She does this often. That’s about the same as the water/land ratio on this planet. I wonder what part of my body is planet and what part is rain she says holding her hand up to the strip light on the roof like an X-ray. Suddenly she stands up, presses the bell. I watch her sway down the aisle, her movements fluid in the shudder jerk motion of the bus. The rain comes down harder, maybe because we have stopped, and I think for a moment we are in a life boat far out at sea. Just a word to the wise, she says, as she turns at the top of the stairs, her mascara streaking down her face like corpse paint: you can drown in just a millilitre of fluid for every pound that you weigh, so you better make sure that the tears you cry don’t kill you. Publishing credits Hermes gives a statement about why he agreed to abandon Dionysus / Poem explains the mechanics of dry drowning: exclusive first publication by iamb How a Guide to winning the Royal Rumble is a Guide for Life: Kayfabe (Broken Sleep Books)

Hear poet Paul Brookes read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Paul Brookes wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Poet and shop assistant Paul Brookes lives and writes in a cat house full of teddy bears. He's published numerous volumes of poetry, including The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley (Dearne Community Arts), The Headpoke and Firewedding (Alien Buddha Press), and A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press). He's also collaborated with other artists – on Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) with Marcel Herms in 2019, and on the forthcoming Khoshhali with Hiva Moazed. Paul is a contributing writer of Literati Magazine and editor of the Wombwell Rainbow Interviews . the poems R Ash Wednesday 00:00 / 00:30 Thas gonna mucky me forehead wi old codgers ashes what we burned yonks since as if it could remove our guilt and sinfulness for doing so. As tha finger paints a cross on me bonce al see our ancestor crinkle and pop Like it were fireworks and watch all harshness and fret go up in smoke. Al have to go mi sen a wesh afore a sees our lass else it'll get her all wonderin' an we don't want that. Don't want folk pryin'. No need. The Gent 00:00 / 00:35 The regular gent as I beep the barcode of his white bread, I take correct change from his held out palm. He struggles to put his purchase into his thin plastic bag. I open the bag wider and drop the bread into it. My wife is cremated, he says She'll be buried Thursday. I say I'm sorry to hear that as my till queue gets longer he lingers, a heavy silence. I say hello to the next customer. The heavy silence moves towards the door. We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To 00:00 / 01:22 go. Too long in the barren teeth of glare, lustre is death, see this wrinkled skin, cancerous blotches, blinded by this sharp, dry lucence. The soft, sodden darkness will give us life. Make us young once more. Rub out these wrinkled laugh lines. Smile again in the night. Blood unclenches without light, opens nightscented warm inside thighs and playful inside fragrant mouths tastes a sweetlife of shadows. Darkness outside reflects the firedark between your thighs, welcoming wild cave of your mouth. Our tongues play together in the juicednight. What has come into being in us is life, life that is tenebrous; eyes use what sunless gives, dark shines in lightness, and lightness cannot overpower it. Aphotic. Listen, words bear witness to dark, so that everyone might believe through them. Words out of warm, wet atramentous mouths. Words are not the dark, they bear witness to the dark. Real dark that gives dark to everyone; it is coming into the world. Publishing credits R Ash Wednesday: Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) The Gent: Please Take Change (Cyberwit) We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To: A World Where (Nixes Mate Books)

Hear poet Em Gray read poems for wave 27 of literary poetry journal iamb. Em Gray wave 27 autumn 2026 back next the poet Brighton-based poet Em Gray's writing often explores themes of neurodivergence, mental health, and the intersection between humans and other species. She was highly commended by the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2024, won second prize in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2022, and shortlisted for the Creative Future Writers' Award in 2021 . She's been interviewed for Modron Magazine 's More Than Human series, and was Mslexia's Poet Laureate for its Summer 2026 issue. Em's poetry can be found in Mindsprings , Propel Magazine , Perverse , Black Iris and elsewhere. the poems Horse goes pillow shopping in Ikea 00:00 / 01:14 Horse knows not to giddy her mare-hips near glassware – observes all creatures here are adept; the tender of tentacles for smalls, Owl who glows on demand. Horse studies pillows of most comfort for most bodies – gets spooked by polyester, what rubs off and on and thinks of moths, of dust not dust but scales that hold prisms lost through collision with the world. Horse isn't wild – more, skittish , defends her ears, wears a ribbon of sunflowers for saying, be kind. Horse wants to lie like a meadowsweet foal but stand-leans into waffle – sensing, to sleep this way, is readiness to run. On telling the depressed to exercise 00:00 / 00:39 It may not be enough to forward us a newsletter lauding the sprung beds of municipal flowers – leave bulbs in paper at our doors, return (on noticing they have not been taken in) to donate a trowel, return with soil, a jardinière, a watering can, then to fill it. It may not be enough to seat us at windows, describe the scent of hyacinths. What a silent disco is and isn’t 00:00 / 00:44 There have to be headphones, the claiming of funtime space like a pub garden or low tide beyond the shingle – glow sticks (ideally), an allegiance to the beat. Passersby should know just by looking when the track drops, and feel plaintive (how it is to watch gladness from an unlit street). What it cannot be is the sound inside your head – confusing your block for the set of a musical in which you are the only dancer. Publishing credits Horse goes pillow shopping in Ikea / On telling the depressed to exercise: exclusive first publication by iamb What a silent disco is and isn't: Lighthouse (Issue 30)

Hear poet Matthew M C Smith read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matthew M C Smith wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Matthew M C Smith, a Welsh poet from Swansea, is editor and founder of Black Bough Poetry . His poems have been in Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Icefloe Press, Wellington Street Review, Other Terrain and Fly on the Wall Press. Matthew is writing his second collection after his debut, Origin: 21 Poems . the poems Cool Oblivion ‘ ... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.’ from T H Parry Williams’Dychwelyd 00:00 / 01:23 Choose life; extract yourself from systems, circuits, voices, spies in ether. Crawl as servant, slave from your masters, take freedom in roadless deserts. Leave gasfields burning. Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns, find your channel in rock, seeking nothing, nothing at all. Close your mind in cool oblivion, hide inside your silent shadow, where blood slows to deep time’s pulse. Dying King 00:00 / 01:51 I am with you. I am always with you. You pulse with a click of the drive. The dying king. I press your paper-thin shroud of skin, as thumbs curl over balsa bones, ridges royal. My eyes probe famine’s fault lines, scan this lucent husk, your twilight mask. Under your arm, now thin, translucent, I once slept, sheltered from terrors in the night. Now, I keep watch. How did it come to this? Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you from fires in the fields, from the sibilant hiss of the underworld, the gaping maw of night. We are skin, my dark follows your dark. * Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. I stand at the edge, choking with loss. Cosmology 00:00 / 00:50 from static we make our slow Rosetta linger lone in void of dark no one can hear us in these rooms of silence this is our language of stars fingers of intricate play & movement there are lights faint and far as moths we are drawn & dance Publishing credits Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press (February 29th 2020) Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic

Hear poet Oormila V Prahlad read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Oormila V Prahlad wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian poet, artist and improvisational pianist. Her poetry and art have appeared in journals and anthologies including Cordite Poetry Review , Black Bough Poetry and Bracken Magazine . As well as being nominated for The Pushcart Prize, she's had work put forward on several occasions for Best of the Net. Author of Patchwork Fugue and A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys , Oormila lives and works in Sydney, on the traditional lands of the Cammeraygal. the poems Dirge in June 00:00 / 00:47 A lone tree wilts in the solstice night— a ripple in blue pashmina. Slow denudation— its trunk is a withering cross sowing moth wings in the night. All around the periphery of the dark hours frost-eaten buds decay, a carpet of papillae strewn on purl-furrowed soil. There is no mercy in the frigid sky. It descends in a shroud of clouds. Myrrh numbs the pain of bruised torsos, tortured limbs shivering in winter’s Golgotha. Padma mudra 00:00 / 01:09 The boy on the marshland is a pious lotus a helix of petals unsullied by the murk of mud. He lies awake at night in a hammock of moon— breath sustained by the thin gruel lining the stalk of his belly. His fingers moisten cotton wicks. Oil hisses into blue-eyed flames as primroses quiver in prayer. The boy knows that his salvation lies in the power of the syllable— he captures cold cursive in chalk on slate forging words forming phrases raising a bridge over the quagmire one kernel of knowledge at a time. An indigo god smiles, bamboo flute in hand glowing from an igneous wall. They will converse—boy and deity and alter what seems to be hewn in stone. Padma mudra is a hand gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism that resembles an opening lotus. It symbolises the journey from darkness to light. Maiasaura 00:00 / 00:37 I know her in her unravelling— her kaolin scales ground to dust scattering upon a tongue of breeze. There are lessons I learn early on— that I must grow a pellicle over my skin to heal the penury of touch. Frenzied murmurations mimic the shape of her armored heart— love is a severed appendage the shadow of a fleeing gecko a clot of cold blood throbbing in the dark. Maiasaura means 'Good mother lizard' Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Georgia Hilton read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Georgia Hilton wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Georgia Hilton is a poet and fiction writer originally from Ireland who lives now in Winchester, England. In 2018, her poem Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh was joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize – her debut pamphlet, I went up the lane quite cheerful , being published by Dempsey & Windle that same year. Georgia’s first collection, Swing , is also published by Dempsey & Windle. the poems Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh 00:00 / 01:26 On Raglan Road I saw you first a dishevelled man with heavy black-framed glasses. So severe you looked but you had a wound that made you beautiful. After we talked that first day, I dreamt of you. You were walking towards me very fast and purposeful with an intent that might have been mistaken for malice, had I not loved you. I abandoned caution at first. But my father gave me a great gift when he said to me, Hilda, you cannot eat words and air, so I became a doctor and married the engineer. But not before I had given you poems with your own name in them, given you my youth. Let you open the catch to a window in my mind, thinking I would fly, but you had me chained to a pedestal. I, no marble idol, just a flesh and blood woman. And you were always an awful man for the drink, you said so yourself, Patrick. Oh to think I might have been one of those sorry women who follow their husbands to the pub screaming for them to come home before they spend the rest of the housekeeping. I might be a creature made of clay, Patrick, in fact, I’m sure I am, but you have a brass neck calling yourself an angel. Cinderella 00:00 / 01:19 If I were to slip into the river, it would not be at Poor Man’s Kilkee, where teenagers and vagrants take their ease with cans of lager. Nor would it be on O’Callaghan’s Strand, where the grey silt is deep, deep and a dozen swans are on the slipway. Nor would I make a dramatic leap off Sarsfield Bridge by the boat club, where an indecisive light flickers over the martyrs of 1916. No – I would choose this stretch, just downstream of the Curraghower with views of King John’s Castle and Thomond Bridge. By day the seagulls swoop and dive, swans fight the estuary current, and you can see the hills of Clare beyond the bend of the river at the Island Field. But by night my eyes are drawn only to the water – the roiling inky black inviting me to shed my history, surrender my skin. The old stone steps are there, I would not need to climb or jump but simply descend like a debutante – keeping both shoes on. On the Naming of Convict Ships 00:00 / 00:45 It seems cruel to name a convict ship the Eleanor. Eleanor, after all, is the parson’s daughter, who smiled at you once or twice. You could no more touch her than you can touch thin air. Eliza is the girl who took your hand at the county fair. Caroline is your sister, Georgiana the grim mistress you have only glimpsed on horseback. Jane is the governess at Manor Farm. Mary is the dairyman’s daughter. Elizabeth the name you sometimes murmur in your sleep, and Isabella is someone you will never meet. Isabelle, Isabella, Bella, Belle. Publishing credits Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh: I went up the lane quite cheerful (Dempsey & Windle) Cinderella: Lunate On The Naming of Convict Ships: Swing (Dempsey & Windle)