Very much looking forward to launching SEE YOU THROUGH at this Broken Sleep Books online launch event tomorrow 8pm UK time: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/broken-sle...

‘Ground troops have demolished greenhouses; bulldozers have toppled orchards, ploughed out crops and crushed the soil; and planes have sprayed herbicides over the fields.’ www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

PREORDER: The Indigo Hours by Maria Sledmere is an immersive, radiant text that moves between autofiction, essay, and poetic prose to document the textures of contemporary longing. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

PREORDER: @laurablomvall.bsky.social Enter Moon by Laura Blomvall is a debut pamphlet of lyrical precision and imaginative reach, charting celestial and earthly landscapes with equal intensity. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

This is fantastic issue. Really great stuff in here. Working backwards from the end (alphabetically!) these are all wonderful GC Waldrep sites.google.com/sheffield.ac... Corey Wakeling sites.google.com/sheffield.ac... And these by Jess Smith are 👌 sites.google.com/sheffield.ac...

McCarthyism is here, and gender scholars and equality activists and even basic human/legal rights proponents are in its sights. I have learnt so much from Judith Butler and now this: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

PREORDER (@alexhouen.bsky.social): Geoff Gilbert and Alex Houen’s See You Through: A Novel is a formally restless, genre-collapsing hybrid that inhabits the threshold between poetry and fiction. www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

Wake up everything you can think of. Language for instance. Any language. Swedish. Du som har mitt hela hjärte. Work it out, until it smiles on you and breaks your heart. From ‘Nine Poems’, in 'Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls', Peter Riley longbarrowpress.com/current-publ...

Tentacular Magazine is open again for poetry submissions www.tentacularmag.com/submit

Because I am angry I will share this again. One of the reasons that Israel is able to target individuals so precisely is that it collects every phone call in Gaza and stores the recordings in Microsoft Azure, then uses AI to analyze and pick targets.

A year ago my book of essays and other prose, on the subject of poetics, and examples of poetics, was published by Shearsman: an account with contents some links (to the book and to excerpts) : robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-...

Visionary, urgent… truly extraordinary blendings of environmental & social history. - Mark Wormald A spirited, astonishing, bewildering collection. - Adam Piette One of 2024's wildest volumes of poetry. - Christian Bok 'Eely' Steve Ely £2 off until Sunday longbarrowpress.com/current-publ...

Spending a few days in the rainforest of Queensland’s Lamington National Park. There are Antarctic Beech Trees here that are over 2000 years old! Amazing place

Open letter for members of the UK academic community (academics and other university staff) to sign, to press the UK Home Office to facilitate safe passage out of Gaza for 40+ students with offers for UK universities 👇 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I’m in #Sydney / Gadigal country, for the first time in years, staying near where I grew up. It’s wonderful to be back. Been sketching the view from my balcony to take it all in

SEE YOU THROUGH, the poem-novel I wrote with Geoff Gilbert is now available for pre-order at a price cheaper than the RRP💐🙌👇 It dances on the crack between unlived life & what happens 👻🐙🐠🌋🍸 @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social @godzillakent.bsky.social www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

⚡️BLACKBOX MANIFOLD 34 is now live!⚡️Poems by Kat Addis, Sascha Akhtar, Charlie Baylis, Iain Britton, Imogen Cassels, Kimberly Campanello, Trevor Joyce, Corey Wakeling, G.C. Waldrep, and others. Reviews by Adam Piette, Olivia Boyle, and David Brazil blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk

Very much looking fwd to seeing Amyl & the Sniffers play live in London this afternoon 🇦🇺🤩 along with Fontaines DC and Kneecap⚡️ m.youtube.com/watch?v=opIx...

A really good opportunity here to study Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia: the Birch Family Scholarship is available to a home fees applicant who has applied for a place on the Poetry MA and identifies as a writer of colour. Deadline 1 August. Please RT! www.uea.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

A really impressive story about foxes, including the intrepid fox ‘Romeo’ who lived in The Shard. Long live the foxes! 🦊✊ www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Tomorrow in Nottingham @fiveleavesbooks.bsky.social ! Thursday in Margate at Fort Road Hotel Bar for The Margate Bookshop!

I write about my review of Terry's Dante here (with a nod towards my own version, nearly complete now): robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-t...

Some of the exercises in the ‘Spirituality’ section of Italian on Duolingo are rather curious

Final reminder for our free, online Bowen Birthday lecture tomorrow. Join us! www.tickettailor.com/events/eliza...

There’s a song thrush singing away in my garden, really lovely! m.youtube.com/watch?v=G53o...

“No one should ever be a refugee in their own land.”

‘RAF surveillance aircraft have done more than 500 flights over Gaza since the war started. While they are officially concerned with searching for hostages, they have been particularly intense when the Israel Defense Forces are engaged in major offensives’ www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I managed to get identified as a cuckoo today by a bird-call identifier app 🥸

My essay collection The Necessity of Poetics is available from Amazon 50% off: £8.54 www.amazon.co.uk/Necessity-Po.... Details here: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-...

Yes, why not?!: “Since students make up 40% of total “immigrant” numbers, why not remove from the statistics all except those who eventually stay?” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“The question, of course, since [people] have several faces, is what they do with the others. They keep them for best: their children can wear them some day. But it has been known for their dogs to go out wearing them, too. And why not? A face is a face”. — Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I’m in Rhodes, Greece, and just convinced my daughter that these are some of the Parthenon marbles 💪 #dadjokes

I’ve come to see the terrific mural that commemorates The Battle of Cable Street that took place on 4 Oct 1936 when thousands of Londoners opposed a march by Mosley’s Fascist ‘Blackshirts’. No pasaran! ✊ www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/Hi...

So the walking ends and we turn in at our doors and switch on the light and there are all the books in rows trying to tell us what we could have done. ‘Nine Poems’, Peter Riley, in 'Truth, Justice, and the Companionship of Owls' (Longbarrow Press, 2019) longbarrowpress.com/featured-poe...

Am pleased to have a poem, ‘Prick of Conscience’, in the latest @pnreview.bsky.social. It’s an elegy for my father who died aged 94 — pretty remarkable seeing as he’d smoked up to 80 cigarettes a day when younger. As Tom Raworth wd say: Rise If Possible. www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scri...

I’m old enough to remember the collective government freak out about TikTok being an arm of the Chinese government. Turns out the call is literally coming from inside the house.

⚡️Woohoo! ⚡️Anthony Vahni Capildeo has won this year’s Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry! It’s richly deserved, and we’re so proud that Anthony is a Contributing Advisor to Blackbox Manifold. Congratulations, Anthony! 🤩 windhamcampbell.org

My cat, Bean, loves watching this little television I bought her

“The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes to converse. Insel thought at me.” Loy, INSEL

Please join us at Castlefield Gallery on Thursday 3rd April for PN Review's Spring Readings 2025, featuring recent contributors to the magazine: Stav Poleg, Ophira Gottlieb, Philip Terry and Alex Wong! Please reserve a free ticket as spaces are limited: www.tickettailor.com/events/carcanetpress...

Looking fwd to this poetry reading this evening! 👇

I’d not realised that ‘Idiom’ and ‘Idiot’ relate etymologically through the Ancient Greek ‘idios’: ‘private, own, peculiar’. Or, as Baudelaire and Lisa Robertson suggest, the peculiarity of art and poetry must be wonderfully ‘stupid’ to stupefy. Robertson: ‘Art must be stupid as a plum’

⚡️Poetry Reading by Rae Armantrout and James Byrne⚡️ In Cambridge, Thurs 13th March at 7:15pm, free and open to all. Further details 👇 poetics.english.cam.ac.uk/2025/03/05/r...

Born #OTD in 1907, #WHAuden wrote poetry that engaged with politics, love, and religion and has moved readers for over a century. For you and the #Auden fan in your life, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volumes I & II are the perfect collection. hubs.ly/Q037mDfq0

Elizabeth Bowen died otd in 1973, in University College Hospital, London, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in St Colman's churchyard in Farahy, Co. Cork, close to the gates of her beloved family home, Bowen's Court.

Face Press has recent pamphlets by J.H. Prynne, plus others imminent by Prynne, Drew Milne, Jennifer Soong and Salomé Honório face-press.org

'This reworking of Dante’s masterpiece is remarkable: for boldness, resourceful inventiveness, and (amidst the jokes, satirical side-swipes, and the gossipy banter) for its emotional and moral heft.' Philip Terry reviewed in Blackbox Manifold: blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/ralphpitebm3...

Very much enjoying Mina Loy’s novel INSEL because of passages like this 👇