✨Submissions are now open for The Propel Cambridge Poetry Prize 2026✨ Entry is free and poets anywhere in the world who have not yet published a full-length collection can submit. The winning poem will receive a prize of £750 and publication in Propel Magazine. english.cam.ac.uk/news/archives/…

‘The new UN report, covering a two-year period since the beginning of the Gaza war on 7 October 2023, draws attention to the “high proportion of children who are currently detained without charge or on remand”’ www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

One week to publication of ELLE: a verse novel. Online launch and publication details here: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/10/my-n...

TONIGHT! 👇

Looking fwd to this poetry reading by ✨ROD MENGHAM and JOHN WILKINSON ✨ in Pembroke College, Cambridge, 7pm this Thurs 20th. *Free and open to all*. Full details here 👇 poetics.english.cam.ac.uk/2025/11/14/r...

Cambridge folk, I am giving a talk on Tuesday 18th Nov, 5 pm, at the English Faculty 9 West Road called "Destructive Characters: Graham Greene to the KLF". There will be Walter Benjamin plus film clips! Come along if you are so inclined; I understand there will be wine.

Stoat Poetry, a new magazine edited by Ingrid Leonard. www.stoatmagazine.co.uk/about

The national Jane Martin Poetry Prize 2026 will be open on 3rd Nov for entries (two poems max) from UK residents aged 18 to 30. No fee for entry. First prize is £1000, second prize is £500. More details here👇 www.girton.cam.ac.uk/jane-martin-...

Looking forward to launching SEE YOU THROUGH in Cambridge with Geoff Gilbert at 7pm, Thurs 23rd October. We’ll be reading with Iain Britton, who’ll be launching his pamphlet UNCERTAIN DENSITIES. The event is free and open to all. Further details here👇 poetics.english.cam.ac.uk/2025/10/16/i...

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