Publisher: Nick Hern Books
3 Billion Seconds, a play by Maud Dromgoole, is a hilarious, macabre love story about a pregnant couple of activists attempting to offset the carbon footprint of their unborn baby's life. It was first performed as part of the 2019 VAULT Festival, London. Also available in the collection Plays from VAULT 4.
“The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing,” Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite “ODSP 1, 2, & 3,” which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.Show book
John Clare (1793 - 1864) was a farm labourer in the village of Helpstone, Northamptonshire, who became arguably England’s greatest nature poet. He rose to fame when his ‘Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery’ was published in 1820. His language preserves many local dialect words in a mixture of classical forms and heart-felt love of country life and nature. The poems in this collection are from his early career, and are largely free of pointers to his later mental illness. (Summary by David Barnes).Show book
Incorporating real-time happenings, "Bedeviled Nightingale" works to explain tragic times for even those people to whom we don't think it could happen. Brianna is an author, hunkered in her cabin for relaxation and work. She uses the cabin as her office and her home, away from the hustle from the city. Divorced and focused, Brianna wants nothing to do but to take care of her world. She enjoys the nature around her and what it provides, until her ex-husband comes knocking down her door. Her Southern ways taught her many things, including ignoring people she doesn't want to be around or talk to. Nathaniel brings bad news from the lower country, cuing Brianna to pack and go with him to her father. Family secrecy is one of many things found in this town. Brianna's family is no different. From the lack of communications to the destruction of other family members, this family was doomed from the start. Desperation brings out the best in people, but not always in the best circumstances. Brianna and Nathaniel both find this out when Short Story Press and Ruth Pettite present "Bedeviled Nightingale". Short Story Press publishes short stories written by everyday writers.Show book
This is a collection of 29 poems read by LibriVox volunteers for April 2015.Show book
The moving account of the life and early death of a young female activist, adapted from her own writings. Best New Play, 2006 Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers' Choice Awards Why did a 23-year old woman leave her comfortable American life to stand between an Israeli army bulldozer and a Palestinian home in the Gaza strip? Compiled from her letters, diaries and emails by Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, My Name is Rachel Corrie recounts her short life and sudden death in her own words. 'Funny, passionate, bristling with idealism and luminously intelligent, Corrie emerges as a bona fide hero for this brutalised world of ours' - Time Out 'A deeply moving personal testimony... Theatre can't change the world. But what it can do, when it's as good as this, is to send us out enriched by other people's passionate concern' - Guardian 'Deeply moving' - Independent 'Extraordinary power' - Time OutShow book
It is true Canada is not exactly a Utopia, Ltd.,for there is hard work and a rough, raw, erudite wailagainst the postmodern loss of meaning and emotion to be donebefore comfort or affluence are built. I used to have a lot of idylfantasies inwrought with Indign traits about your too bruisedand scared surface looking into the seeds of time. How now,my masters! Smacks not this one-acted poem of the greatnational prosaic life of Arcady? Zolf’s fifth book assembles a pirate score of error-ridden historical and current documents – missionary narratives, immigration pamphlets, settler writings – to decry the ongoing violence of Canadian colonialism. It stars Janey Settler-Invader, a foul-mouthed mutant slouching toward the Red River Colony, along with a host of cacophonous, carnivalesque appropriations. Praise for Janey's Arcadia: 'That poetry can be forcefully consequential is not a safe assumption in our contemporary crisis of sustainable attention. To deploy an intricately political poetics as Zolf’s performative texts do is a wager on expansion of the genre with no small risk of misreadings. The driving courage of Janey’s Arcadia is in fact its digital-age enactment of an allegory of misreading. Subjecting Canadian settler texts (in which indigenous peoples’ humanity can be casually or fervently dismissed) to Optical Character Recognition software, a chilling and ludicrous display of misreadings occur, inescapably charged by the cultural politics of non-recognition. A reader’s encounters range from the philosophically profound “Each person is an asking…” to the OCR mutated government questionnaire. Q: ‘Do you expei'ience any dread of the Indigns?’ A: I have no fear of Indigns, for I never see one.' – Joan Retallack 'Few poets embody stress like Rachel Zolf. Pain most poets cannot imagine exposing with such exacting affliction. Janey’s Arcadia recommends we reconsider the weak arguments of “post-identity politics” because this poet sees how we will lie to hide the brutality of our collective suffering for civilization’s advancement. If you read this without waking your emotional intelligence, well, I’m glad I’m not you with that stick so far up your ass. This is the real poetry. I know it is because it changes me.' – CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE ’I’ve been locked up in this room so/ long, mon dieu, whatever desires arise in me are rampaging/ as fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.” A great hunger, ravenous as Canada, and filled with rage and hurt, animates Rachel Zolf’s splendid new book. On one hand Janey’s Arcadia brings us a few hundred years of western colonization, and on the other, these poems speak to everyone who’s living on someone else’s land or those forced to speak in someone else’s tongue. Whether it’s Cree or English, French or Cobol, there’s always a man and a machine happy to misprise you. “C’est bien. By every fair means. In Manitoba....”’ – Kevin KillianShow book
