“about this” Bonnie Tobias (Warren Publishing) – book review

January 28, 2026 — emmalee1
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Bonnie Tobias about this book cover

Bonnie Tobias’s “about this” probes childhood exposure to parental depression and its aftereffects in terms of anxiety and feeling silenced as a parent’s emotional state took priority, with the aim of offering some comfort and emergence into adulthood. It also explores how a now adult views of that childhood diverge from the parent’s. As the first poem, “poems for you” acknowledges,

“an ischemia

has crept
into the valley
of remembrance

severing the tendrils
of our relationship

now disjointed”

It concludes that the poem “only soothes/ the writer”. There is a sense of cathartic release in the poem as well as the maturity that the parent will not see the poet’s childhood through the same lens. That doesn’t make either an unreliable narrator, but highlights the different emotional stances and the imbalance in a parent/child relationship.

This theme becomes apparent again in “yours to bear”,

“the original assignment
of suffering

the authentic knowledge
this is never going away

it’s mine
it’s yours
ours to manage

never eradicate”

Neither parent nor child will change their view, as both are being true to themselves. However, neither are sweeping it under the carpet either. It may not be resolved but a truce has been reached. The important thing is that neither is denying the other’s viewpoint. The poems’ speaker further explores her feelings in “about you”,

“anything held
is
vacuous

because of you
i lose all
sense

grounded to earth
i ride the sky”

The parent’s sense of hopelessness and despondency has seeped into the child, whether the parent intended it do or not. Things seems pointless. There’s no joy, but no tears either. A nothingness that lacks an anchor. The speaker knows she is on the ground but feels weightless, as if she is floating through life with nothing holding any meaning for her. Even as an adult, she returns on “a trip home”,

“the small parts of me that long to
cling to your hands
smell your skin
look into your eyes

i want to be

wrapped and held
in one single thread of you
endless
timeless
always known”

There’s a child who wanted to be held and cuddled by a parent who connected and understood. However, depression prevented that. The poem’s focus is only on the daughter’s viewpoint, although arguably the child should have been at the front of the parent’s mind. Later “silent ‘67” sees the child told to stop crying at her grandmother’s funeral,

“emotions, needs, voice
all of me

shamed into
silence”

Later, riots erupt. The family move away but the daughter frets,

“adult voices
soundless
no explanation
no reassurance

frightened child remained
silent
a good girl”

The child knew she’d get no reassurance or understanding from her parents so stayed quiet, burying her fears. Of course buried emotions don’t stay buried. When the child moves up a grade at school, those buried feelings emerge as tears and crying. Instead of meeting comfort and reassurance, the child is told to stop, bribed to keep quiet. The child feels unseen and learns that expressing herself is not a good thing to do. This causes problems later, in “friday” and addiction described as

“consenting
once again
to the abuser”

Later, after hearing a siren in the distance,

“closer to home
a hornet is
buzzing

building
its own
nest”

Addiction is not romanticised, the addict knows she’s abusing herself and it’s not a solution even if it brings temporary relief. However, it is also buying her time to fix and work on herself. The first step there is to accept that the speaker now has to become the parent she wanted as a girl and parent herself into an adulthood where she gives herself the permission to feel and emote which she should have had as a child.

Tobias uses plain, pared back, stripped down language to reflect the place she had to start from. A minimal place free of distractions where no euphemistic phrases were allowed to gloss over the problems that were being avoided. A place where emotions can be expressed and acknowledged instead of buried. A place of safety but not dishonesty. At its heart that’s what “about this” focuses on. How emotionally neglected children have to adjust to adulthood without the confident and support from parents. It’s plain speaking may lack poeticisms, but it underlines authenticity and emotional honesty.

“about this” is available from Warren Publishing.

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“Twist” Bruce Parkinson Spang (Warren Publishing) – book review

January 21, 2026 — emmalee1
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Bruce Parkinson Spang Twist book cover

“Twist” is an evocative look at life through a lens of wisdom gained. Bruce Parkinson Spang celebrates the apparently ordinary with lyricism. He shows compassion and understanding for mishaps and mistakes through lessons learnt. Appropriately the collection starts with looking back to childhood, where we all start, in “The Child of Frankenstein” where Spang’s father dresses his son up as Frankenstein’s monster, but “our neighbors/ weren’t fooled. ‘Oh, Brucie, how cute,’”, while Bruce was thinking,

“I wanted to be me, a third grader
who lived at 10 Arlington Avenue,
sang in a choir, wore a white
robe; a boy with buckteeth,
a crewcut, and a body mom
called “husky,” who couldn’t
scare a fly off his nose, couldn’t
wait to yank off his mask,
spread candy on his bed.

That night Father set the mask
on my dresser. Its empty slots
for eyes stared at me as if that face
wanted to be stitched to my face.
For decades, I was still that child,
even with my own room, my own
bed, so afraid that mask became him.”

The father’s desire is to make his son in his own image. But the son sees himself as different and desires to be his ordinary self, whatever that may be. But how does a child reject his father’s vision for his future without falling out with his father? That fear carries him into adulthood. The Frankenstein’s monster mask representing his father’s wishes and everything the son doesn’t want to become.

Another Hallowe’en sees that son, now a father, making a lantern in a pumpkin for his young daughter in “Behind the Mask”. However, she’s scared by a trick-or-treater dressed up as Dracula,

“she slips into bed, but she keeps her bedroom
light on just in case more Draculas knock.

The next morning, after breakfast, she pries
open the front door. Mr. Pumpkin, gone.

To the left and right no sight of him.
Where has he gone? We find his skull

and toothless smile smashed on
Route 1. ‘But why, Daddy?’

I pick up one of his eyes, a perfect
triangle, hold it up as if, by gazing through

it, I could see the teens lifting him
overhead and tossing his grinning face

into oblivion. Why? I ask myself.”

The father tries to comfort his small daughter by telling her not to worry. But behind his words, the father knows, “the monster, unmasked, has come to life,// as real as the splattered flesh/ and candle crushed beneath our feet.” What goes unsaid is that the daughter will have to learn to navigate this world of unmasked monsters in time. The couplets suggest though that the daughter will have her father’s support in a way the father didn’t have the support of his own.

Later there’s a return to a childhood home, in “Back to 6 Saint Charles Street”, where the current owner insists on a tour,

“But it was their home now,
where rooms would shelter them
within their walls for a time,
whatever time they had,
and then would let them go to take
that home with them into memory’s dominion.

I don’t remember what the owner and I said,
his being a young father, my being an elder.
But, as I stood by the doorway,
he opened his arms to give me a hug
as my mother would have done
before telling me, dressed as I was
in my David Crockett coonskin cap,
‘Go on now. Go out and play.’”

Childhood memories merge with the present day. The interjections of “but” capture the dual nature of this being a childhood home and a present day home for another family who are putting their own stamp on the place. However the new owner and poem’s speaker form a bond of sorts, through a home shared at different times, as the new owner instinctively goes into father mode and offers the visitor a father-son hug.

Teen friendship is the focus in “It Goes Like This”, which ends at a school dance where both Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” and The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” were part of the DJ’s repertoire,

“Some couples seemed to be grooving, really hummin’
in their own galaxy, while others like my friend
and me circulated like planets through the dark
immensity of the gym. We drifted in and out
of the dance, waiting for the Beatles to sing,
You know, you twist so fine . . . come on
and twist a little closer now. Then we danced
again as if the universe had suddenly changed
its mind, reversed itself—let me know that
you’re mine—and contracted into us. Just us.”

Initially the poem’s speaker seems to be an outsider, definitely not coupled up with a partner like the couples so wrapped in each other, the rest of the dance floor need not exist. It’s only when the speaker lets himself get lost in the music, that he becomes one part of the coupled-up universe that everyone else fades away. There’s no suggestion here that the feelings for the friend are anything more than friendship. That comes later in “First Date After Coming Out at 48” with a man his own age. There is an earlier reference to “Star Trek” before the poem ends,

“In the end, I wanted to beam my body up,
wanted to keep feeling that sweet transport
from Earth to pleasure, but he, old hand
at piloting men back to Earth, took out
his hand towels and wiped up the evidence,
wiped us so clean we looked as if nothing
had happened when I wanted it to happen
again and again and again without anyone
stopping us—wanted love to hurtle me
at warp speed from one galaxy into another.”

This isn’t just a first night with a new partner, but a first night where the speaker felt fully-engaged with love-making. The mask can finally come off and the speaker is relaxing into the adult the boy wanted to be.

Spang’s poems are rooted in the ordinary, looking back through a forgiving lens. They explore how an individual is shaped by parental and societal expectations and how wearing a mask to fit in distorts an individual’s shape. It’s only when an individual is able to twist from expectations into their true selves that love, including self-love, can be found.

“Twist” is available from Warren Publishing.

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“Familiar Phantoms” Sue Forrester (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

January 14, 2026 — emmalee1
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Sue Forrester Familiar Phantoms book cover

“Familiar Phantoms” are the ghosts that haunt us individually, sometimes a relative forgotten by others or memories that won’t let go or even things that we didn’t really understand as a child and weren’t satisfied with the explanation given by grown-ups. The first poem, which is also the title poem, explains further as “we have come to understand”, the phantom who

“……….turns on the light
…………….as a distress signal
for a lost purse,
………….a broken date,
……………………or A&E.

But not the one who darts
…………past the window
……………..towards the porch,
runs away down the path,
………….her cloak pale
……………against the yew tree.

We know she never knocks
………but not why she comes,
………………not yet.”

Readers can understand the ghost who has an obvious need from us, whether a lost thing, a romantic disappointment or serious accident. But the needs of some ghosts are lost time. The cloaked spirit who runs past the house isn’t known to the family in the house who therefore can’t explain the spirit or help her. The spirit herself isn’t yet trusting enough to let herself be known or to try and communicate her distress. There’s a lingering hope she might, eventually.

Childhood memories surface in “Needlecraft”, where a needle is “survivor of the pair I used/when my big sister taught me to knit”. However, the poem suggests that learning never got further than,

“the pot holder I’d knitted for Mum;
an M chainstitched in emerald green yarn
the wobbly finishing touch.

Still warm, the needle goes back in the kitchen drawer;
it came out clean – so the lemon cake is done.”

The needle that was used to knit has been repurposed as tool to test whether a cake has properly baked. Yet it hasn’t lost the memory of its original purpose. The poem’s speaker still remembers that first time she used them and what she used them for. The pot holder is only alive in memory so seems to have been lost or discarded.

Food is a rich source of memory. Tastes and smells are poignant triggers for ghosts. In “And Apple Pie” an aunt,

“Easier-going than her sister, she dispensed chocolate biscuits from a silver-trimmed barrel, gorgeous summer drinks of vanilla ice cream soda, slippery sweet macaroni pudding, hot lemon in a blue Cornishware jug for colds. She came to look after us so my sons could be born at home, her housewifely ways as neat as herself: an apron donned for morning chores, laundry folded to save ironing, apples for pie peeled onto purpose-cut squares of newspaper. She painted me a copy of Morisot’s The Cradle. We thanked her with a silver and black obsidian butterfly brooch. I think of her when I wear it and, more often, when I make apple pie. And I mourn that biscuit barrel, swept away in a heartless house clearance, her daughters knowing only their mother, not my aunt.”

The poem’s speaker has inherited the broach she gave to her aunt as a thank you for helping out when her children were born but still mourns the loss of the biscuit barrel that actually represented her aunt. It’s also about how more distant family members can be overlooked when it comes to dealing with the aftermath of a death. The aunt’s own daughters rightly look priority when it came to distributing their mother’s belongings, but the niece feels overlooked as the daughters didn’t give the niece the option of a keepsake other than the broach. Apple pie, although something linked to the aunt, feels like a poor substitute because it’s temporary. A biscuit barrel is a better holder of memories but lost.

How memories are created is considered in “At The Barley Mow” where a pub offers a fortnightly karaoke night. The poem’s speaker notes that Mick has changed his repertoire of Sintra songs to reflect his circumstances, regular Leanne changes her hair colour to match her costume, newcomers “wisely sit and listen”, but the unforgettable act,

“And then there was that time the new lady curate –
do call me Karen – popped in for a medium Pinot Grigio spritzer
and rocked a raunchy Hey Big Spender
in her black cassock.”

It’s not just the unexpected choice of song but that it was performed with gusto by the curate still wearing her cassock. It seems to have been a one-off performance.

There are also people who continued to haunt someone long after they’ve become distant. In “Whoever She Was” she is almost remembered,

“on a city street, fruit barrows on corners:
the hammerball swing of her satchel,
gutters rusty with leaves ripe for kicking,
privet stabbed by spent rocket sticks.

Or glimpse her at soot-sparkled stone railway stations
where dark, shining heads pressed urgent lips
already lovesick with missing.”

The reference to “satchel” suggests a childhood memory of someone known through school, but not a close friend. The image of railway stations and “pressed urgent lips” is evocative of the film “Brief Encounter”. The poem’s speaker can’t bring a name to mind or place this ghost, just that she knew her once and something prevents her letting go.

“Familiar Phantoms” are the gentle ghosts that act as reminders of people and things no longer in our lives that we don’t want to let go of yet. The familiarity comes from the repetition of memory, not necessarily the person or object themselves. While no one who witnessed it may have forgotten the karaoke performance from the curate, no one in the audience is likely to have been close to her. Sometimes the familiar is in something apparently trivial, a repurposed needle or a biscuit barrel, that has no financial value but an intrinsic one because of what it represents. Sue Forrester has created a subtle, multi-layered collection.

“Familiar Phantoms” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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“Balancing Act” Elizabeth Dunford (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

January 7, 2026 — emmalee1
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Elizabeth Dunford Balancing Act book cover

Elizabeth Dunford’s balancing act comes from being a carer for others at different life stages, for adult children, grandchildren and ageing parent while also not losing sight of herself. As a carer it can be easy to put the needs of the person being cared for over and above the carer’s needs and feel disconnected from what makes a carer themselves due to the difficulty of making and keeping plans or simply finding some time alone. Her poem “Off Centre” using a line from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, ‘the centre cannot hold’, is a celebration of difference,

“A nutcase, a fruitcake, a weirdo, a witch.
Different, special, atypical.
When the centre is rotten, can no longer hold
Let’s welcome eccentrics in from the edges
Glean wisdom from those who view from a slant
Learn lessons from those who’re so honest it hurts.”

Those kept on the margins acquire wisdom not learnt by those who follow the crowd. The marginalised often reject the status quo and aren’t concerned with maintaining appearances or soothing the egos of others. They can offer a different viewpoint drawn from lived experience. The last line hints that we could all do with hearing the unvarnished truth occasionally.

The notion of truth also surfaces in “Square Pegs, Round Holes”, where a grandchild, playing with a shape sorter, corrects grandmother who describes a square and a circle to be told they are a cube and a sphere after a cuboid has been turned into a train,

“and your hand hovers for a second
over the correct gap
but no, it’s a boulder from a landslide
blocking the line. You place the pink cone
and purple pyramid for danger signs
while over the green triangle tree
the orange half-moon glows.”

It shows how the child, who wants the specific names for the three-dimensional shapes, rejecting the names for their two-dimensional equivalents, can also transform those shapes into an imaginary drama of a train being blocked by a rockslide. Grandmother can either destroy the magic or play along.

Motherhood also offers lessons, “Things I Learned as a Mother” starts with making “trains from cucumber” and develops into

“How to hide among racks of clothes
while shopping with a teenager
and when to appear with the credit card.
When and where to talk:
never in the morning or straight after school,
sometimes while driving, avoiding eye contact.
When to be brisk and cheerful, when to offer a hug.
Where to hide in the garden when you need to cry.
How to feel guilt.”

That last line “How to feel guilt” is a refrain, appearing at the end of each stanza. Motherhood can be a time of all-consuming responsibility and soul-searching: is the mother doing enough or too much, how to balance working to put food on the table with preparing properly nutritious meals from scratch, navigating the teenage years when a child feels they can take on things they are not necessarily mature enough for. There’s a trick to being a supporting act without hugging the limelight.

Caring at the other end of live, the elderly has a celebratory note, while fruit goes past its best and sensible dinners are left in the freezer,

“but the biscuit tin is empty,
the birthday chocolates have disappeared.
You sup marmalade straight from the jar,
like Paddington, relish Turkish Delight –
rose, lemon, pistachio, powdered in sugar,
lick raspberry ripple, rum and raisin,
salted caramel, mint choc chip – Yummy!”

The poem concludes that when someone’s nearing then end of their life, why not, “squeeze in all the sweetness that you can?”

The title poem starts “Birds and small children do it without apparent effort” while carers “teeter on the tightrope” and “lurch from/belief to doubt” and “glimpse from time to time the dizzying depths/of the abyss/beneath my feet”. Caring is not just about the physical acts, but also the mental loads of keeping to schedules, paying bills, and trying to plan ahead when no two days are the same.

“Remembrance of Times Past” talks of a love that was “chilled Prosecco foaming in the glass”,

“Now we are blurry
as a well-worn blanket, familiar
as English Breakfast in a favourite mug,
salt and vinegar on a fish supper,
a mellow swirl of red wine. We are
holly that prickles, ivy that clings,
stays glossy green throughout the year.”

Love that endures doesn’t stay bubbly forever but takes the acid with the sweet and mellows into comfort. It looks to celebrating small victories and remaining together despite children, grandchildren and caring for elderly parents.

Dunford’s poems focus on the details of everyday life, the sandwiching of a generation between caring for grandchildren and elderly parents, leaving little time for life itself. How this causes the need for keeping a balance between the demands of caring and finding space to be and live. “Balancing Act” casts a compassion eye over a tightrope, noticing the wobbles and the rope’s texture, the friction that enables a carer to stay upright and reach the end of the rope in one piece.

“Balancing Act” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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How to Win a Themed Poetry Competition

December 31, 2025 — emmalee1

I was judging the Harborough District Poetry and Prose Competitions to decide on the Junior Poet Laureate and Poet Laureate for the district for 2026 – 27 and have been invited back to judge the next competitions in 2027 for 2028 – 29.

These competitions were themed, i.e. entrants were expected to write a poem on the competition theme.

What makes competitions with a theme different from competitions with an open theme where any topic can be written about?

It means you can’t simply choose your best poem and enter it, unless your best poem happens to tackle the theme chosen for the competition.

From a judging point of view, themed competitions can help remove some of the subjectivity. All entrants are writing about the same topic, so it’s harder for a judge to be swayed by the subject of the poem and easier to focus on the objective criteria.

For entrants, a theme can feel like an obstacle, particularly if it is something that doesn’t appeal. It’s a tough decision when you’re eager to run up publishing credits and competition listings, but if a theme leaves you cold, it may be better not to enter.

Tips for Entering Themed Poetry Competitions

  • Don’t rush to your files of poems, find one that loosely mentions the theme and think “that will do”. It probably won’t.
  • First read the competition guidelines – are there any hints or tips in there that might suggest approaches or things not to include? There might not be but familiarising yourself with the guidelines is never a waste of time.
  • Check the competition leaflet or website or announcement, it might include a piece from the judge(s) who might suggest approaches.
  • Sit with the theme for a while – think about what it means and how it might be approached.
  • Your first idea is probably the same one everyone else has so think further. Judging a competition with a theme of anniversary, I was bombarded with birthdays and wedding anniversaries. The story that stood out was an anniversary of a village fete.
  • Your second or third idea is probably better.
  • If you’re struggling to get started, try an acrostic as this will get you thinking around the theme and you may notice a pattern or element that needs further exploration.
  • Now you can look at your files of poems and see if you’ve got something suitable but be prepared for a re-write. When you originally wrote the poem you would not have had the theme in mind.
  • If you’d rather write something from scratch or haven’t got anything on theme, write a first draft, which may just be a mind-map or brainstorm about the theme.
  • On editing, remember that as well as looking for the things that make a good poem, you also need to put the theme front and centre. You don’t have to boldly signpost it, but it needs to be there.
  • Look at your draft. Is it a coherent poem or just a string of images. If the latter, try creating a narrative arc that link your images.
  • Go through all the stages of writing a poem. Consider each line – does it say what you want it to say in the way you want it said, does each word earn its place. Read aloud – how does the poem sound? What form have you used – does it work with or against the poem? If using rhyme, consider internal and slant rhymes rather than full end of line rhymes.
  • Put your poem aside for a period. Come back to it, does it fulfil the theme, or can you work out what the theme is from reading it?
  • Double check you have understood the theme. If the theme is “seasons”, have you mentioned all four or just one? Have you balanced the seasons? That doesn’t mean giving four lines to each season, but does the poem feel as if it favours summer and only mentions winter in passing?
  • Read the guidelines again. Do you have the right number of lines and the right form or format? Don’t sabotage your entry by putting a villanelle in a sonnet competition or entering a 42 line poem in a 40 line competition.
  • Don’t let self-doubt win. Your poem can’t be picked if it’s not entered. Ultimately the judge can only select from entered poems.
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“Fragments” Tara Singh (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

December 17, 2025 — emmalee1
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Tara Singh Fragments book cover

Tara Singh’s innovative poems explore the aftermath of (unspecified) trauma and the power imbalances, prejudices and other societal structures that act to silence victims, prioritising the status quo over healing. The opening poem, “dissection of multitudes contained” ends,

“tip me on your bedroom floor

fingers through ventricles
valves like rings
heartstrings in your palm

trace paths of travel
arteries veins nerves
know me inside out but

my lids are sealed
you’ll never know
the colour of my eyes”

There’s disassociation at the heart of the poem. The speaker is overpowered in a relationship that is supposed to be romantic – references to “heartstrings” – and intimate. Yet there’s also violence. The unnamed other knows the speaker’s body physically, but not her innermost thoughts. Her eyes are kept shut so the other doesn’t see the colour of her eyes. She’s holding something back that implies she doesn’t feel safe. Clinging on to that secret is important to the speaker as it enables her to feel she knows something the other person doesn’t. It’s a small piece of agency. It’s also a meme that husbands don’t always remember the colour of their wife’s eyes. In the poem, the other only seems interested in what he can take from the speaker, not in building a safe, intimate relationship.

The title poem, “✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗” looks at the worst from of sexual violence, how woman are encouraged to yell “fire” rather than name the assault to get help from passers-by,

“⊗ beds bleed before
blackout ✹ crows
can have this carbon
⚘ return it as
cabbage butterflies
∞ heart misses
bloodbeat ⊗ empty
fist of air ✹ He is
embolism
⚘⊗∞✹
fingers print
whorls sear
◯
⚘ Fawn
∞ Flight
⊗ Freeze
✹ Fight”

The last four single word lines are responses to abuse from the weaker party who might choose to “fawn”, i.e. attempt to appease the abuser to reduce the abuse, “flight”, i.e. get away, “freeze”, i.e. become so overpowered and overwhelmed the body refuses to move or respond or “fight”, the most dangerous option. The order is logical, a victim is attempting to appease the abuser, then attempts to get away, then freezes as if taking stock of the situation and releasing that the first two options failed, before fighting back. The symbols used along side the words appear in a different order in the title: fight, fawn, flight, freeze. This is an emotional order, the first response to fight back and defend, then to attempt to appease, then to get away and finally freezing as the victim runs out of options. It shows how abuse victims don’t response logically because they are so caught up in the situation, they don’t have the luxury of stepping back to take stock. But it’s not just logic that’s at play in the victim’s responses: the power of the abuser is a factor too. Whether that power is physical or a reflection of the abuser’s status in society.

“on your wedding night you slept on your mother’s thread” looks at the gift of a bedspread from a grandmother, “her embroidery/needle gripped soft in workhard thumb” which creates “a spray of flowers from my Nani’s imagination/her gift for your wedding day”. The poem imagines the bride and a friend sitting on the bedspread, and the friend runs

“my fingertip across the silk gilt petals
‘it’s cruel to keep birds in cages. I can’t fight’
I carry on looking at the bedspread
notice how much my Nani’s petals
look like golden wings in flight”

The bride already feels trapped. The “gilt petals” implying that even a gilded cage is still a cage even if it’s a comfortable one. It also points to a power/status imbalance. The bride has entered the marriage at a disadvantage. She has lesser status and this is not a marriage of equals. She is likely to be told that she should consider herself fortunate to be materially comfortable and that she should ignore her physical and emotional discomforts.

“Survival Messages” comes in two parts, the first is a list that ends,

“7. Don’t ask for help
8. Food is not promised
9. Safety is a suitcase under the stairs
10. Rest is dangerous”

However, “Survival Messages (reboot)” ends (Prasad is a sacred sweet offering in Sikhism, made with wheat flour, ghee & sugar. It’s always served warm & is traditionally offered in the palm of one’s hand, cupped to receive the blessing. Surmadani is a traditional ornate bronze container used to store & apply surma (powdered kohl eyeliner) this object has deep roots in South Asian culture)

“7. Don’t forget, when you finally made that call asking for help
you dared to reach from the dark & found a hand to hold
8. Food is a grain of rice pressed between the pages of an atlas,
served by hands that do not shake – even good food scalds
your pot if left unpromised
9. Safety is sweet ghee from prasad on your palm, your
grandmother’s surmadani tracing your eyes & a suitcase filled
with smarts under the stairs
10. Rest is found under grass or as ashes – but also in beds; Naps
are dangerous to those who want to own us”

The initial messages are stark commands that sum up a situation where a victim has become isolated from a support system. The victim hasn’t anyone to ask for help, isn’t going to get their basic needs met and isn’t allowed rest – either from the abuser or from the effects of abuse which keep someone in a flight/fawn/fight/freeze mode and unable to plan or strategise an exit. The rebooted versions are softer and compassionate, indicating the courage needed to ask for help, that having basic needs met is a right, that religion and rituals associated with it offer safe spaces, but most importantly rest isn’t something that only happens in death. Restorative naps are possible. Sleep-deprivation is a form of torture that leaves victims unable to think straight, unrested and running on empty. Restorative sleep is a way of reclaiming a sense of self, and space to think.

In “Fragments” Tara Singh has created a powerful sequence of poems exploring the power/status imbalances that trap victims with abusers. Singh demonstrates awareness of how form, whether free verse, duplex or using symbols to represent words indicating where victims can’t speak or where words aren’t enough, can work with a poem to convey and enhance meaning. Singh has a compassionate, interrogative eye.

“Fragments” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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“Full Body Reclaim” Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

December 10, 2025 — emmalee1
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Caroline Stancer Full Body Reclaim book cover

“Full Body Reclaim” explores the reclamation of an abused body, without going into detail about the abuse itself (which isn’t necessary and is not for the reader to demand to know). It doesn’t stop in the immediate aftermath but also further down the line, after motherhood. Motherhood itself can a tricky period for abuse survivors, but can also help the feeling of taking ownership of a body back; no longer an abuser’s plaything. The title poem notes, looking at a lily,

“Within your hushed, folded bloom, thunder’s noise
approaches, the fierce rumble of sky and rich soil
thrilling spine and skull and bringing rain that soaks
away skin without pain so it slides free from bones.
As if a creature, maybe a rabbit, could shed spoilt
skin, but when it was cast off, instead of leaving
a wounded thing, only the luminous rabbit soul
would rise, essence of grass and fields and swift
rabbit, restored and returned to pure breathing.
And then slowly shrugging back into skin, whole
now and shouldering physicality as a heavy gift.”

The poem’s speaker feels as if reborn, having sloughed off the body that was abused, and can now look forward to a future. A future in a body that has been cleansed and is free from the abuse. Boundaries set and the speaker is beginning to enjoy her shape and her being. It may not be perfect, but it is hers.

“Shame” is a tool used by an abuser to control,

“I was a sealed jar, until a ruthless boot
kicked and cracked me, then placed me
in a convenient cupboard.
No longer watertight,
my liquid dripped onto the high table,
into the plush rug.
The seepage was unsightly,
with pinched shapes at the spreading edge
of darkness, like narrowed eyes.
It came from me, proof of corruption,”

However, it is not the victim who should feel shame but the perpetrator. Yet the perpetrator is able to make the victim feel ashamed and use that feeling to keep the abuse secret. The victim seeks to blame themself and feels as if the shame is some sort of proof that the abuse is the victim’s fault.

The poem’s speaker moves from victim to survivor. The sequence “Surviving” uses animals as metaphor, in part iii, “Isolation: Giant squid”,

“I shared my body with the swelling sea,
flowing in freedom, salty and edgeless.
We cephalopods have been shapeshifting
in these depths for five hundred million years,
to the rhythm of our three hearts pulsing.”

Letting go of the abuse and shifting into a shape that feels like home, enabled the speaker to adapt to life free from that abuse. It’s also a place from which the speaker is able to consider the abuser, in “Faceless”, “He was a needle, not sewing to join anything together/ but because he enjoyed the holes that were left behind”. The journey continues, an abecedarian in “A-Z gratitude list”, has some seemingly random items, “G is for gusting wind”, “River’s brown windows”, “S is for shingle”, until “Zips. Keeping a child warm/ by closing metal teeth with my fumbling fingers.”

“Thriving” ends on part v “I want to live”:

“I used to want to die, but now I want to live. Last autumn they cropped the willow trees with chainsaws, leaving brutal bare heads next to the canal. Eighteen months later the branches are sweeping and trailing again. Yesterday I saw the first fronds touch the water. Today in the garden we do the high jump. I only reach around knee height but my son flings himself over an old plank on two deck chairs. Higher and higher, he flies and thumps back down, flies and thumps, flies and thumps. My messy old heart thumps with him, and each thump hurts. Some of my arteries get tangled and a few vital fluids escape, but my heart needs the air and by the end of an hour it is a fleshy balloon, full up with gladness and exhilaration. Soon my blood vessels refill themselves and sweep and trail again. I want to live.”

“Full Body Reclaim” shows the poems’ speaker did indeed live and continues to live. That’s not to say the abuse has been completely left behind, but it’s in a place where it is acknowledged, the damage it did recognised, but is now managed. The speaker has reclaimed her control. Her abuser no longer holds power over her. Caroline Stancer has created a quietly powerful collection. There are no rants against what happened, but a subtle clawing back, a regaining of control and autonomy, an adjustment from disassociation to love.

“Full Body Reclaim” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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“The Postcolonial Flâneuse” Ramisha Kafique (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

December 3, 2025 — emmalee1
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Ramisha Kafiqu Postcolonial Flâneuse book cover

Ramisha Kafique updates the role of flâneuse to today’s world, taking in streets and cafés both local and distant. In the process, she also subverts the original role of a white male strolling city streets and recording what he observed to that of a Muslim woman, recording what she sees and how people observing her react. As the title poem, “Postcolonial Flâneuse” observes,

“Neutral positions clash with colourful scarves and turbans, veils, bands, and bracelets. You can’t tell them what not to wear, here. Is it my faith that is silencing me or your gaze? Is there a lack of me in the spaces I inhabit?

“Give space. deep breaths, sighs, long strides, fingers fiddling in laps, chins resting in hands. Alhamdulillah. I can walk where I like.”

England’s bland, grey streets where everyone was in business uniforms or a casual uniform of sweatshirts and jeans, are being opened up to colour and signifiers of different religions. There’s a challenge too as the speaker asks if those observers who see her as different are assuming her faith doesn’t allow her to walk alone or visit a café without a chaperone or their attempts at intimidation, even unintentional, are trying to push her out. The poem’s speaker, however, is not deterred. She records in “Book in Hand”, “She has become part of/ the mass. She is him, and her,/ and them.”

In a “Café Soundtrack”,

“Conversations
between
individuals at tables.
Merging into lyrics.
……………….…………………………………………………Break
Sound of grinding coffee beans
and laughter from behind the counter.

Accents:
Yorkshire English.
Emirati Arabic.
Local Nottingham slang.”

This is a cosy, relaxed space where café customers are too busy with their own conversations to specially notice that difference languages or different accents are being spoken. No one is unwelcome. Only the speaker is noticing and she is neutral, but that neutrally came at a price. In “For Those Lost in the Kashmiri Diaspora”, she notes,

“Girls in Jammu and Kashmir cannot walk through streets
or sit peacefully in cafes reading books.

Girls in Jammu and Kashmir tiptoe through military zones
on their way to school and go missing on their way home.

In Nottingham I don’t face the brutality
of an occupation.
My walks through the city are safe,
full of people gazing through the noise.”

The poem concludes,

“I’m told I shouldn’t tell people
I’m Kashmiri but when I do,
they expect my silence.”

Colonisers expect the colonised to say quiet. But there also seems to be an expectation that the poem’s speaker shouldn’t talk about where she’s from as if she would be embarrassed by it or there’s something shameful about being from somewhere that’s been colonised. That has similarities to the way abuse victims are encouraged to stay silent instead of speaking about their abuse when the shame should lie with the abuser, not the victim.

Bringing readers completely up to date is “Cyber Flâneuserie”, where,

“Static. Breathing through the phone speaker.

Storytelling on social media has become
ten second video clips and boomerangs.
Lip-syncing trending songs,
lined and filled with gloss.

Constant transactions.

Scrolling masked users, insecurities, Al aesthetic.
Poor credit score balances, influencer points
per label. No returns offline.
Everything held in your own hands.”

Ten second video clips can’t tell a complex story so rely on tropes and recognisable signals instead. The “lip-syncing” brings to mind karaoke and the implication that both listener and lip-syncing person are passive, singing/speaking given lines rather than creating something new. But here, online, the singer needs an audience or at least likes and shares to satisfy algorithms and boost their online presence. What online viewers see isn’t guided by their own choices, but what algorithms decide so although the online world feels as if it’s in a viewer’s hands, it is not.

The chase for shares, etc, has its downside too, in “A Hashtag”, there’s a sense that social media users must,

“Conform or leave.
Fit this box.
Permission to create your own,
denied.”

It’s a stark reminder that allow we can freely access social media sites, they are owned by someone else who needs them to turn a profit. The differing agendas mean users are pushed to behave in a certain way even if they’re not aware of that.

Rafique brings the flâneur/flâneuse into the contemporary worlds, holding a mirror up to English streets. She notes how people interact, how differing voices may or may not have space to speak. She turns that same forensic gaze to the online world and how social media users are encouraged to limit the time they have to speak and are also encouraged to self-censor in order to chase social media currency of likes, shares, followers and influences. “Postcolonial Flâneuse” exemplifies the poet’s role in negotiating and witnessing social interactions.

“Postcolonial Flâneuse” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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“Rainbow Candles” Tony Challis (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

November 26, 2025 — emmalee1
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Tony Challis Rainbow Candles book cover

Tony Challis writes on his experience as a gay man, looking bad and forward but it’s not his sole focus and he plays with form: villanelles, sonnets, list poems, monologues jostle for position among the free verse poems. The pamphlet is split into three sections, “Heart”, “Tongue” and “Hands”. The first feels personal, in “Through the Door (February 1972)” where a twenty-five year-old speaker “never been kissed./Not properly, not by a man” watches and concludes,

“Afterwards there is a new rhythm to my life,
I can never return to the outer darkness,
the dialectics of my desires will drive me on.”

It’s clearly a turning point, one that suggests the speaker has accepted his sexuality, and that he’ll never hide it by pretending to be something he’s not, even if he’s not shouting it from the rooftops. A quiet acceptance. Even a quiet acceptance brings its problems. In “Another Quiet Queerbashing”, where the speaker visits a man in hospital, beaten up by a baseball bat wielding group,

“He could only smile with his eyes,

the frame clamped over his face prevented
speech, bolted in place to help his jaw heal.

I had to keep some flow of words going,
talk about mutual friends, shows…

He could write brief notes on paper, just.
If I’d brought a companion maybe banter,

cross-talk, jokes shared to liven his time.
I recall the gratitude in his warm gaze.”

When the worst happens, a small act of solidarity and compassion goes a long way. The couplets underline the sense of two people meeting, two people knowing their roles could be reversed. The speaker could be the one seeking friendship after a beating.

The middle section seems to have an ironic title since its focus is mostly on local wildlife, such as “For I Will Consider the Squirrel Who Shares My Garden”, after Christopher Smart’s “I Shall Consider My Cat Geoffrey”, where the squirrel

“For he rarely disturbs the surface where I have placed a layer of chilli flakes where bulbs are set.
For he, wisely, makes for the trees if I step into the garden.
For he has been seen atop my fence, laid over another squirrel, intent on adding surplus to the squirrel population.
For he has been startled when I clap loudly at such indecent behaviour.”

It seems that human and squirrel have achieved a standoff: the squirrel doesn’t disturb the bulbs the human plants where chilli flakes were laid, but helps himself to those that aren’t protected. The squirrel is smart enough to climb a tree when the human goes outside, keeping his distance. The human seems to accept this, but draws the line at the squirrel mating. Although the squirrel isn’t going to see that as “indecent behaviour” and it likely to continue when the human isn’t looking. From his point of view, it’s the human’s behaviour that’s not decent.

A mother waits for news of her son who is away at war in “Beyond Words”, and remembers him as a young while wishing he was still with her to help on the farm,

“anywhere but where he is now.
She calls herself coward, traitor.
No news is not the worst news.
Silence lies across her landscape.
She is thankful that no home-based soldier
has walked towards her, uttered a numbing apology.
She is glad for the quiet.”

Not having an answer, leaves her in a hopeful limbo. She can pretend that good news is on the horizon because she has no definite knowledge of where he is.

The mood changes in the final section. “All that Glitters…” uses the fairytale Cinderella, who, after midnight strikes,

“I staggered from him, from them,
I fell down a black tunnel,
the dress returned to rags
I was at the fireplace, pale coals lay on dark,
my guts wanted to fly away.

And there, furious faces hanging over me,
my sisters, scowling and spitting, and my father,
frowning by the door, a cane in his hands.
I squeezed my eyes shut, reached up
to capture the dream, oh to catch the dream!”

At that moment, attending the ball seems like a bad idea. She’s had an evening of splendour and it now to be punished for it. Even so, she tries to remember it, cling to that memory imagines she could taste that night again. There seems to be an acknowledgement that her life isn’t her: there’s a princess inside her who can dream, who might escape.

The final poem turns to Chaucer and “The Canterbury Tales”, in “All Together Now”,

“The spirit of the Wife of Bath will stir no porridge
but three husband shades around the pan
will jockey for the right to hold the spoon.
I hear more queueing at my door. Do you always
have so many spirits about your person?

My head is full of fun and frolic,
Of sorrow and shame, of triumph and tragedy.
This is the rule inside any scribbler’s brain.
Know that I can never sup alone.
Bring your spirits, let them blend with mine
And all shall dance.”

The rhythm bounces. It’s a jocular poem. And it sums up the quiet optimism that runs through “Rainbow Candles”. At times, there seems to be an acceptance of the way things are without a desire to make significant changes. That might be a frustration when you wish Cinderella could know that life’s about to get better for her. Readers might want the speaker to have more agency, protest against the baseball bat wielding thugs. But in “Rainbow Candles”, Challis draws attention to the small wins, the strength of solidarity, the courage that comes from being true to yourself.

“Rainbow Candles” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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“Remembering” Julie Gardner (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

November 19, 2025 — emmalee1
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Julie Gardner Remembering book cover

“Remembering” is an appropriate title for Julie Gardner’s pamphlet which collects memorial poems for her mother and her late husband (including a couple from her late husband). Some poems do have an elegiac feel, some are playful, bringing in nursery rhymes in a sequence about a single mother who had her child removed and the consequences in the aftermath. The first poem, “Watching” (after Grace Nichols) ends,

“Two women linger in the confines
of the poem and though they don’t feel old,
they hold a weight of years, knowing –
and not knowing –
………………….……………what’s to come.”

“Old” is a relative term, to a child, all adults are “old”. To adults, anyone more than an decade older than an individual is “old”. Equally “feeling old” is a relative concept and difficult to accept when you remember your youth or don’t feel as if you are ready yet to accept how you might be perceived. “Weight of years” holds a heft of experience, knowledge gained through living. Yet knowing the past, doesn’t help forecast the future, particularly when you factor in an individual’s free will and ability to either repeat past mistakes or learn and take a new approach.

The idea of how past knowledge influences current events, surfaces in the sonnet “Virgilia’s Lament”, which has an epigraph of a quote from Coriolanus accusing his wife of crying at his homecoming from battle and asking if she would have laughed if he’d been killed.

“At each new day begun with bitter tears
I take up arms and gather in my pain.
I thrash, I fight and, driving out my fears,
speak aloud the honour of his name.
Rejecting what I knew, rejecting all,
I storm into the dark of unbelief.
So gods, look down and hear my angry call.
Then feel the fury of my unforgiving grief.”

She grieves her husband’s absence but also his return. She can’t fight alongside him, only wait at home for news, any news. His boastful triumph is hard for her stomach because she knows it urges him back to war, away from her side and away from peace. The angry phrase of grief.

Tears surface again in “Aberfan”, a coal-mining disaster when a landslide of a waste tip covered a school in 1966, leaving 144 dead. The poem’s speaker wasn’t directly involved but remembers,

“That afternoon
two hundred miles away
we watch the news
we watch my mother’s tears.”

The poem’s speaker’s mother understands what happened. The children, watching the news, haven’t processed what they are seeing, just watching their mother’s reaction. That reaction is still remembered years later.

“A New Year’s Resolution” sees a husband and wife set out on a daily walk, although the pedometer breaks,

“by then it didn’t matter – we knew
our favourite routes. For a whole year,
and then a few months more, we walked.

And when at first you began to slow,
in my new-found optimism, I believed
it was me who was getting faster.”

The resolution was made with every intention of keeping to it and with an optimistic looking forward to a future where the couple are fitter, perhaps weighing a little less, and healthier. Ironically, it’s that optimism that misleads the poem’s speaker into believing her walking is getting faster, because she has no measure, when in fact, her husband is getting slower. A warning of the illness to come. But also a problem of relatively, like how old is old? In measuring her pace against her husband, how can she know that her pace isn’t getting faster? How can she know the problem is that her husband is getting slower?

In “Turning Point” a widow, after returning to a daily routine of sorts, keeping her grief neatly tucked out of view, goes to meet her daughter. The humid weather pushes the pair into a café,

“We found sanctuary at a quiet table
in an air-conditioned room, stayed
long into the afternoon, drank
cold white wine, enjoyed good food.
First hint of appetite returning.”

The widow finds herself able to drop her guard. She doesn’t have to pretend she’s not grieving, but doesn’t have to talk about it either to her own daughter. Perhaps the wine helped lubricate a loosening of tongues, not into a drunken or tipsy slur but into a freedom to talk and enjoy company without guilt. It’s noticeable the poem’s speaker doesn’t detail the meal because it’s not important, but remembers the feeling of wanting to eat, of being still alive.

“Remembering” is a focus on the, often emotional, responses to significant events and how emotional memory can be triggered by a news item or a taste or someone speaking thoughtlessly. Coriolanus fails to understand Virgilia’s reaction to his return, the children fail to understand their mother’s tears, a wife fails to see it’s not her walking speed that’s improved, but her husband’s has slowed, a widow, in an unfamiliar café, is jolted into remembering she’s permitted to enjoy company and food again. Gardner’s poems are subtle and considered, striking a balance between accessibility and careful choices in words and form that demonstrate understanding of craft and seek to invite the reader in.

“Remembering” is available from Five Leaves Publications.

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