A couple of days ago, our editor Toby Litt published a poem on his Substack, A Writer’s Diary. It was a response to criticisms of the Fossil Free Books campaign. Since then, the controversy over Fossil Free Books has become even more divisive. Many but definitely not all of the members of Writers Rebel […]
Read More… from On the Fossil Free Books ControversyToby Litt
1st Snow was a kind of hand-wringing heat; mine burned psychedelic red with it. Where your footsteps trod, it cast blue shadows like a methane fire. Crystals, so many I couldn’t get the maths straight in my head, falling feathery, light … FeatherLite, my nan’s eiderdown, all put away now inside some cupboard. We […]
How did the collaboration between you and Ruth Padel on 24 Splashes of Denial come about? The Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the beginning. Its release was shocking and psychically disturbing for many of us. Inaction felt like a betrayal of everything I loved, believed in, […]
Brandon Ra Pestano is a 26 year old poet of mixed Guyanese and English heritage from Brighton, England. He has represented the South of England in spoken word at the National Portrait Gallery, as well as performing his poetry at Greenwich West Gallery and having a short poetry film exhibited at the Institute […]
7.9 inches of rain fell in Central Park last night dead cicadas on the crosswalk their bodies bunched in brittle knots sticky candy sky bright with grief branches submerged by the weight of our silence a letter unread a door closed firmly & […]
Read More… from The Month of Emergencies – poemRebecca Faulkner
Whether you can get there from here or wherever depends on whether you are there already, on whether you will find that you are already standing amidst the outspread hands of its stones, and their misty grey dawns, on whether indeed the arcs and folds of that sky really can make all location moot […]
The Great Barrier Reef diver/cameraman ‘cried in my mask’, to see the bleaching. Mankind is beginning to take creaky baby steps towards being able to live forever. Just when there’s no more forever to live in. There is a shock that sidles from the phrase ‘humans were rare,’ as applied to time in […]
The Names of Trees I I should know the names of trees and birds, and where to find them. I should have this, poised to give, to any who might need it. Dirt should sit, be lodged, tattooed, beneath my fingernails. And I should know its feel, and warmth, and temperament […]
Threading Our Way Peace River territory The Peace purls a ripple stitch across the Rockies down through fertile valleys air shimmers in waves over the hot road to Hudson’s Hope glistening fish hide in hollows fishers patient hopeful on the farm Grandma weaves a sheaf of wheat into wreathes […]
The Prayer of the Common Newt In a muddy pond, in the outskirts of Clydebank, a mother, with over two hundred eggs inside her, is beginning the process of giving birth. Over the next few weeks, each day she will deposit about a dozen of them not on a folded over leaf, […]
Hau kea white snow, snow (Hawaiian) In this tropical archipelago, snow is most likely to be found on a simmering crater. In winter the temperature at the summits of Mauna Loa, Haleakala and Mauna Kea – the state’s three tallest volcanoes – drops to below freezing. Mauna Kea means ‘white mountain’ and it […]
Sakura Not Yoshino in April when blossom-fringed branches bow towards the ground in prayer beneath an early moon illuminating the frailty of white clouds where friends gather to sip sake and petals flutter to the ground pale as moths but deep January in Islington’s Highbury Fields where these tender buds this early […]
Animal Eden It was the year of the viral video, nature coming out of hiding. We were supposed to believe that within weeks, animal life had overwritten us with their joy and reckless abandon, as if instincts told them like radio waves signalling through the ether that humans are under quarantine and no […]
For a Coming Extinction (after W. S. Merwin) You whom we have named Charger, Challenger, Great King, and Noor the shining one, now that you are at the brink of extinction, I am writing to those of you who have reached the black groves of the sky, where you […]
XRWRITERSREBEL · Twenty Four Splashes Of Denial by Ruth Padel Ruth Padel is a poet, novelist and non-fiction author, Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She has published a novel focusing on wildlife in India, and a range of non-fiction […]
Read More… from Listen: Twenty Four Splashes of DenialRuth Padel
Shoulder Season The creature lies still in the villa’s pool, waiting for the day the caretaker rolls back the tarp and the first wasps of the year thrash themselves to stillness. Then they come, writhing on their inflatables, the holidaymakers. It’s not until midweek that the family’s youngest, grown sufficiently bored and appalled, […]
ARE YOU HERE FOR THIS? < RANT WRITTEN TO BE READ LOUD WRITERS REBELLION, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, OCTOBER 2019 > THIS IS THE WRITERS REBELLION CALLING! I AM HERE FOR THIS! ARE YOU HERE FOR THIS? CALLING ALL MY BOOKISH COMRADES. ALL THE INKY-FINGERED INTROVERTS, THE BESPECTACLED PEN PUSHERS, CALLING ALL WRITERS AND READERS, BOOK LOVERS […]