It’s not often you get asked to read 222 books in two months: looking back on being a 2022 Forwards Prize Judge.

2022 Forward Prizes winners Nick Laird, Stephanie Sy-Quia and Kim Moore exiting Forwards photo shoot.

It’s not often you get asked to read 222 books at a sitting – let alone within two months. But that was the challenge – and the gift – that being asked to judge the 2022 Forwards Prizes brought to the doorsteps of Fatima Bhutto, Nadine Aisha Jassat, Rishi Dastidar, Stephen Sexton and I over the spring of 2022. Delivered by increasingly disbelieving couriers, box after heavy box of books made their way to us. They were accompanied by emailed individual poems, for the Best Poem category. With submissions for 2023 closing on 5 March, and this year’s judges revving up for their marathon read, it seems a good time to look back on the gift of being one of the 2022 Forwards Prizes crew. I also wanted to re-share the 2023 good news that poets can submit their own work for Best Single Poem, Performed here, free of charge. All other entries need to be submitted by publishers. 

Anthony Joseph reading from ‘Sonnets for Albert’

Back in 2022, for Fatima, Nadine, Rishi, Stephen and I, the impact of all those books arriving was something like a lifelong chocolate lover finding themselves suddenly swimming in a chocolate fountain. How to take it in the richness we were offered, without becoming overwhelmed and losing our powers of discrimination, was the challenge we faced. In my own case, to fit in the reading, overnight everything became book-shaped. If I was making a meal, I was reading a book on the side. If I was eating a meal, I was reading a book on the side. If I was travelling on the tube, I was reading a book standing, or sitting. When we met for the short-listing meeting, one of my fellow judges said that they were reading anything between two and ten books a day once the numbers of submissions ramped up. The rest of us simply agreed. 

Clare Pollard

Because the books followed me everywhere, wherever I happened to be, I was constantly reminding myself not to let go of, lose, mislay or forget the collection which was my companion of the moment. For all I knew, it might prove to be one of the ones which made the prestigious Forwards Shortlists for Best Poem, Best First Collection, or Best Collection, or indeed ultimately won one of the big prizes. Respectively worth £1,000, £5000 and £10,000, they offer an incalculable and enduring career uplift to the poet concerned, beyond their already significant cash value.  

Cecilia Knapp

To make it more interesting, I’d never formally judged anything before. I have a PhD from UCL. And I’ve done a lot of reviewing over the years, everywhere from the TLS to the Poetry Review and Poetry London.  So the tools were in place.  Would I know how to use them to winnow down such a huge mass of material? The first test would be creating our individual shortlists, ahead of the formal shortlisting meeting. Building up to it, I found myself waking in the night with the weight of responsibility. I was comforted by knowing this was a shared endeavour. Up and down the country, and across Scottish borders and over the Irish sea, and further afield too, Fatima, Nadine, Rishi and Stephen also had their shoulders to the wheel. We were carrying the decision-making collectively. 

Helen Mort reading from ‘The Illustrated Woman.’

Fortunately, as I read steadily onwards, in my book-shaped world, a sense of the material began to emerge. We were sent many outstanding poems, but certain collections had a coherence, as well as newness and difference, that made them stand out. Their parts held together and were of a consistently high standard. As Rishi Dastidar observed, they often also made our pulses race with excitement. These books, and individual poems, also gave us a sense of entering new worlds – defined by the language through which they were realised, the shapes they made on the page. In my own case, this was the work which began to make its way onto my longlist. Or rather into the set of four stacked plastic drawers into which I was posting my serious contenders, for further consideration. 

Joint hosts Stephen Sexton and Shivanee Ramlochan

When we came to swap longlists, ahead of our first meeting, our intersection points became the roadmaps which led to the eventual nominations. The judging meeting to decide the shortlist took place over many zoomed hours, on a hot, late spring day. It was exhausting and wonderful in equal measure, generating deep conversations around the works under consideration with other people who had thought about them as intensely as we each had. At the end of the day, we all felt that the shortlists that we arrived at were genuinely communal decisions. 

`Holly Hopkins reading from ‘The English Summer’

We chose poems written on front lines, responding to climate change, exploring migration, queerness, illness, identity, questioning, affirmation, faith, shame, desire, sexual predation, and sexual reclamation. They went into the woods, and into stinky kitchens, peered back at us out of buckets. Our non-human species included crows, butterflies, hyenas, cats, dogs, seagulls, and fungi, to name but a few. Mothers were sometimes wrecked, sometimes wrecking. Other times sources of profound nurture. Fathers might, or might not be, not terrorists. We were there as life began, and ended, with Nobel prize winners, and poets who had yet to publish their first full work. 

Kaveh Akbar reading from ‘Pilgrim Bell’.

There was humour and anger, play of all sorts, a relentless inventiveness and above all a sense of the sheer magnificence, and courage of the creative process, on page after page. It felt extraordinary, and deeply heartening, in a year when hope and joy often seemed in short supply. You can read excerpts from all the 2022 shortlisted collections, and the single poems in full, on the Forwards website, and find them, along with all the Highly Commended Poems, all in the Forwards Anthology for 2022

Nick Laird

Over the summer and autumn, we then had the task of winnowing down the five shortlists to a single winner. Every shortlisted poet had a compelling case for being chosen as the winner of their category, so it was a hard call. Because I knew how much I’d valued hearing from Stephen, Fatima, Nadine and Rishi, there was less anxiety this time around. We were a good team, who had found our collective process and identity through the first sets of strong choices. But we were going to need all those skills to come to the best decision we could make. 

Padraig Regan reading from ‘Some Integrity’

The days were shortening by the time we met again, and the conversations were engaged and warm, but also searching. We had had the summer to live with our fifteen shortlisted books and poems, to think about them from different angles, to respond to them in more open and relaxed ways than had been possible in the frantic read-to-the-finish-line of the first judging meeting. Once again we gathered on our zooms, with companion animals appearing in the background, or sometimes foreground, and occasionally barking their comments. And the winners that we arrived at were, miraculously, all ones we believed in, and stood behind wholeheartedly.

Misty Manchester on the evening of the 2022 Forwards Ceremony

That knowledge made the awards ceremony in Manchester’s Contact Theatre a genuinely joyous event. The event format celebrates the entire shortlist, with each poet reading, before the final decision is announced. This was also the Forwards Thirtieth Year, and its first Award taking place outside of London, which added to the edgy, vibrant excitement.  Despite the chilly weather, there was a real buzz in the theatre even before the sold out audience took their seats, with many more joining from around the world via streaming.  Reflecting the Northern location, poets within reach of Manchester were packing in, including Malika Booker, Jason Allen-Paisant, Andrew Macmillan, Simon Armitage, Kayo Chingonyi, Natalie Linh Bolderston, and many more. 

Warsan Shire reading from ‘Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head.’

The readings were mesmerising, and moving, bringing out the value in each work. Together we cheered Stephania Sy-Quia, Padraig Regan, Warsan Shire, Holly Hopkins and Mohammed El-Kurd for the best debut, with Kim Moore, Anthony Joseph, Kaveh Akbar, Shane McCrae and Helen Mort for Best Collection, and Nick Laird, Cecilia Knapp, Louisa Campbell, Clare Pollard and Carl Phillips for Best Single Poem. You can read more from each of them on the Forwards website, and I would warmly recommend this. Kim Moore, Stephanie Sy-Quia and Nick Laird were then announced as the winners. 

Louisa Campbell with furry dog head.

Because the word ‘winner’ can have an almost obliterating quality, as if that achievement becomes the defining quality of the work, I wanted to finish this blog by sharing something of what I felt gives so much to readers in the Kim Moore’s and Stephanie Sy-Quia’s collections, and why the work of the Forwards Prizes has so much value in supporting artists whose work will make a lasting difference to the world at many levels. Nick Laird’s extraordinary poem, ‘Up Late’, can be read in its entirety via the Forwards website, and speaks for itself, but it can be a big investment for many people to buy a book at the moment. Here are some pointers towards what lies between the covers of Amnion and All the Men I Never Married, for those considering taking the plunge and buying these two brilliant collections.

With fellow judge Nadine Aisha Jassat

Turning first to Stephanie Sy-Quia, who won the Felix Dennis prize for best debut for Amnion, from the first time I heard from her read from the book, at the online launch, and well before I ever saw a printed copy, I had the sense that she was working into crucial new territory around questions of migrations and gendered identity, both thematically, and in terms of delivery.  I was also struck by how she was able to embed a very young woman’s voice into the poem, including sections which were first drafted while she was still at school. 

Best First Collection and stand in waiting nervously to read.

Through the extended, fragmented form, Amnion builds an organically alive structure which is simultaneously open and connected, able to interlink multiple generations and diverse identities, always questioning how the individual narratives are sited relative to the dominant power structures and historical realities shaping their outcomes. Part of this arises from Sy-Quia’s ability to find language and imagery that locates the individual as a moment in time, and a product of their histories and migrations, but also of the languages which have determined the apprehension and transmission of their cultures, and the experience of their gendered bodies. 

Stephanie Sy-Quia reading from ‘Amnion.’

Re-reading Amnion for the second Forwards judging meeting,  I found the idea of the family or social group as an externalised amnion – that is a symbolic version of the  membrane that protects the growing foetus – interesting to explore.  It made me think about how groups can shelter and contain growing, evolving beings, but can also generate their own forms of harm through the holding-in of intergenerational and other traumas, especially ones that lead to, or result from, displacement. My own father-in-law, Oscar Nemon, came to the UK as a refugee, and lost 22 members of his family to the Holocaust. Sy-Quia’s ability to invoke and create imaginative empathy for the impacts on psychological health (including depression), of feelings of un-rootedness arising from cultural displacement therefore resonated with me, as it will potentially with many readers. 

Writing about adolescence and young womanhood, Sy-Quia also places the female body centrally within the narrative, as a unit of reception, and perception. She explores teenage desire and vulnerability, and the loss or confusion of self which can come about as a result of predation, and exploitation during those vulnerable, hope-filled, urgent years, in a way which felt radical. There is a degree of privilege in the boarding school segments, but they butt the narrative up against the gender and class monopolies which Amnion interrogates, while also reflecting how ‘history’ and myth may be manipulated to shore up existing power structures, including those of empires and their toxic, ruinous aftermaths. All these questions come together towards the end in the final ‘Epilogue: Epithalamion’, which merges the political and the personal with immense power:

I AM WRITING NOW from the inky heart of empire,
its assonance no more unknown to me.
I shall knock the pillars out from under you
and label you up 
in room upon room 
of Wedgwood blue.

I HAVE SHUFFLED ALL THE SHARDS of what came to me broken
and I have not pried, for dealing in shards is what I wanted;
these being my inheritance.

THESE BEING
my demands
my thanks
my by rights

I USED TO WORRY that the performance was never quite for my own 
benefit;
that I owed it to others, that without me they might never apprehend and
therefore I was duty-bound to make the point
again and again
with the quiet militancy of washing rice before cooking it in a saucepan.
This has been the extent of it: cooking rice. 
But it is possible, as I have found, to delineate blood-bearings to each
their own.
My brother, for instance, is less interested in this quandary.
My father, for instance, professes to be half, which would make me a
quarter.
I reserve his right to do so; but my claim is my own. 

Forwards Audience taking their seats

Ultimately, Amnion left me with a feeling of making a path out of darkness and displacement towards claiming and belonging, which was powerful and real, and to which I think many will relate. Kim Moore’s second collection, All the Men I Never Married, also works with the gendered body as a political, as well as an intimate space, engaging with and articulating some of the forces and constraints which inform how women, and men, move in the world – both as living beings and as artists.  It is the interplay between these two strands – of the lived experience and the creative response – which gives the collection much of its uniqueness. 

Best Collection waiting nervously to read.

As I read, and re-read Moore’s collection, it became a hauntingly ‘big’ book. Its surface ‘accessibility’, arising from a string of ‘anecdotal’ poems in a variety of registers and forms, builds a navigable causeway leading the reader out into deeper waters. Moving through them, we explore desire, and its consequences, and the complex societal and cultural forces that form and give rise to this force within individuals, whether they are predatory, or subjected to predation. The poems also allow us to question from whose perspective the narratives under scrutiny are, and have historically been, represented. 

Moore is writing in conversation with Rachael Allen, Rachel Long, Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson, Katherine Angel, Fiona Benson, Helen Mort, also on this list, and many others, giving a porousness and permeability to the poems within a larger discourse – which enhances their resonance. Her building block is the individual self, and the individual body, and how these tessellate either lastingly and fleetingly to those around them. The prefatory, un-numbered poem begins, ‘We stand at the base of our own spines/ and watch tree turn to bone and climb/ each vertebra to crawl back into our minds,/we’ve been out of our minds all this time’. 

A stand-out poem is 7, which Moore read at the Forwards ceremony. Beginning “Imagine you’re me, fifteen, the summer of 95” it remembers the “stranger” at the end of a log flume ride who reaches out to brush a drop of water from the speaker’s thigh. The work of the poem takes place in the doubled perspectives of the account, moving from the second person  address to the teenage girl – “And you are not innocent, you’re fifteen,/ something in you likes that you were chosen./ It feels like power, though you were only/ the one who was touched, who was acted upon.” – to the third person, seen as if from the man’s point of view. Now she becomes “A girl… with hair to her waist/ and he’s close enough to smell the cream/ lifting in waves from her skin…/ and why should he tell himself no, hold himself back?” The poem closes “You remember this lesson your whole life,/ That sliver/shiver of time, that moment in the sun./ What am I saying? Nothing. Nothing happened.” 

There’s a blend of delicacy, quietness, and horror, and a sense of this transgressive action echoing down through the years because not called out or defined as wrong, that is potent, partly in its restraint.  Other poems aren’t afraid of exploring rawness, and a compulsive, propulsive sexualised intoxication, as with 15, when the speaker writes of a relationship where: “I thought love was a knife/ pressed to the throat, I thought there was a blade/ in each of our hands. I am telling this now so he appears/ as real as that first night when we didn’t sleep./ The slight red stubble of his beard, the freckles/ covering his arms – his gaze, his attention all mine –”. 

From fumbling teenage confusion, to disturbing encounters in hotel corridors, or on trains or in taxis, while including also support from mentors and others who positively expand the sense of being differently, the collection makes the reader part of its own process of investigation and discovery. Through this, we share in the work of progressive redefinition and reclamation, from the starting point of being “a stone pretending to be a woman/ in the dark or like someone returning/ from a land nobody else could see.”

This trajectory generates a sense of arrival upon reaching 48, the concluding poem. Here, Moore’s voice recalls being told by an established, canonical, male poet, at the start of her writing life, that she should not speak of straightening her mother’s hair as a child. We, the readers, feel why she has come to understand that as a result of this “I have held my tongue for many years.” Evidence of the journey travelled, away from that silencing, lives within the poem. Moore has formed language and imagery that enables what was not allowed to be said to resonate with the reader in all its subtle complexity and vivid life:

My father elsewhere, and part of me still there,
part of me in the library with the man
who told me not to speak about such things.
The lawn. The drifting dusk. The bats.
My mother’s hair. My hands. That house.
The shudder of a horse’s flank. 

As I publish this, the 2023 Forwards judges will be receiving their last boxes of books, and print-outs of poems.  This year’s judges are Kate Fox, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Andrés N. Ordórica, and Jessica Traynor, coming together within two separate panels, being chaired respectively by the legendary Bernardine Evaristo for the Best Collections, and Joelle Taylor for the Best Single Poems. Along with many others I will be waiting, when summer comes, to hear the results of their hours of careful reading and thought, and to investigating the recommendations of the 2023 shortlists.

Kim Moore reading from ‘All the Men I Never Married.’

Speaking a rainbow: performing live at StAnza Poetry alongside Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka.

St Andrews, Scotland.

Note: this blog contains non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse in a context of witness and healing.

Preparing to travel to St Andrews, in Scotland, for the StAnza Poetry Festival 2022, I flickered between nervousness and excitement.  It was my first long trip since October 2019. The traveller in me was thrilled to be seeing new places after so long. But I was going there to speak about ‘Erasure – what cannot be said and how we say it’, alongside Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka. Writing respectively about Ireland’s foundling homes, and Romania’s orphanages, and my own childhood experience of being sexually abused, our work does not hesitate to enter complex areas, while being strongly committed to healing through creative witness. I knew the event would be a powerful one, and would need to be approached carefully. I spent the days leading up to departure working on my talk and performance, which you can read at the end of this blog or watch via the video link on the StAnza website which includes Annemarie and Maria’s readings as well.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

To reach St Andrews from London meant five and a half hours of constantly changing landscapes, and a succession of passengers sharing the communal table where I was working.  Around York, three generations of women settled in beside me, the same beautiful bone structure playing like variations in music across their faces as they laughed and chatted.  Later, a mother came with a toddler, who rode firmly standing.  He was mainly eating crunchy snacks or wailing the extremely convincing siren on his police car. This repeatedly turned heads down the carriage as we sped through roadless fields. Finally, from Newcastle, a woman whose hair made a waterfall over her face as she fell into peaceful sleep. So many strangers in close proximity, after months of limited contact, felt bewildering – but wonderful. 

Maria Stadnicka

Towards Berwick upon Tweed, the sea became the train’s companion. Winds had blown away the grey that we left London under, and the waves were turquoise under a blue sky. Beyond Edinburgh, as we sailed through the air over the Forth Bridge, the clouds returned and the sea became shades of pewter and silver. This same wind was blowing hard as we disembarked at Leuchars, then travelled onto St Andrews. It was whipping up the waves as I followed the street on which my guest house stood, down to the sea which lay beyond a fence and low granite cliffs. 

After watching events on zoom from London, the live festival began for me  with fellow Pavilion poet and former civil rights lawyer, Mona Arshi’s, inaugural address in the auditorium of the Byre Theatre in the centre of town. Mona’s subject was the Nationalities and Borders Bill currently passing through the UK Parliament.  If passed into law, it will reverse many of the key tenets of the 1951 agreement on refugee rights.  These were put into law following the genocides of the second world war.  With examples from poets, and guidance from a barrister who has written on the proposed changes, Mona left her live and online audience in no doubt about the urgent need to protest the bill. She explained that it seeks to criminalise and penalise the seeking of refuge in all but the most narrow and restrictive of circumstances, and make it impossible for people to arrive in England without prior approval, even when the channels for this approval are largely absent.

Mona Arshi

Why our cultures are so deeply enriched by travel and migration was borne out by the headline event for Friday evening.  Kayo Chingonyi, who came to the UK as a child from Gambia, and now lives and teaches in Leeds, and Safiya Sinclair, who originated in Jamaica, but now works and teaches in the USA, shared the stage with the Syrian poet Nouri Al-Jarrah, reading from A Boat to Lesbos.  As an audience, we were on the edges of our seats for nearly two hours with a short interval, as you can see if you view the recording via the StAnza website, where Mona’s is also available. At other events, brilliant Irish poets included my fellow Forwards judge Stephen Sexton, Gail McConnell, whose The Sun is Open, was one of my most compelling reads of 2021, and Padraig Regan, whose Some Intensity has just come out with Carcanet.

Safiya Sinclair joining from the USA

The following morning the clouds were gone and the skies were blue again. From my room, I could hear the wind was still blowing hard, feathering the sea with a lace of frothed foam.  I’d come down to breakfast shaken by the news from Ukraine, and nervous about my own reading. I found Stephanie Sy-Quia already in place, having travelled from France to read from her debut Amnion, which responds to her families’ multiple heritages, reaching around the world from the Philippines through Europe and beyond. Stephanie was followed in short order by the Latinx-British poet Leo Boix, who was performing both his own poems and those he had translated. We were then joined by Saturday and Sunday nights’ headliners, Holly Pester and Luke Kennard.  To breakfast amid so much kindness and friendliness was the best possible start to the day. 

Holly Pester live on Saturday night

Then it was time to thread through the streets of granite houses back to the Byre theatre again, to catch Pascale Petit and George Szirtes talking with Yang Lian’s translator about rendering Chinese poetry into English. They discussed the very different structures of the two languages, and also the implications in Yang’s poems of working within a literary tradition that extends back 3000 years. As a bonus, Yian Lian was on hand to comment, and read one of his poems in Mandarin before a Saturday evening showcase. For the travel-starved among us,  Pascale and George remembered their own journeys to China to meet Lian, and visit the Forbidden City and Shanghai.

George Szirtes, Annie Rutherford and Pascale Petit.

Pascale had mentored me very generously under the Jerwood Arvon scheme when I was finding my feet as a poet. Afterwards, we caught up as we walked her back to her room through sunny St Andrews. Saturday morning shoppers and university students were beginning to head out into the town’s coffee shops, boutiques and ice cream parlours. Next it was back to my room to run through my own reading which was due to begin at 2.00. 

My unimpressed audience of seagulls

To steady myself, I practised my set for an audience of seagulls, who were more interested in launching themselves into the gusting wind from the chimney pots of the rooftops opposite. Within the performance, the poems fall down into my personal underworld of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, before climbing back up into the light of witness and healing. Reading what I was going to say to a sky of rushing clouds helped anchor what I was going to share into light and life. I wanted to absorb and transmit that energy.  I had read, and loved both Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka’s work, but finding Annemarie waiting in the auditorium by stage, and Maria guarding us from the screen like an angelic presence, further strengthened my hope that we would be able to create something of value together. 

Annemarie opened with the foundling hospitals and mother and baby homes of the Irish state, remembering those who had brought their babies there because they had no other options. Helping us feel their great loss, and the loss also for Ireland as a nation, Annemarie set it within the larger wound of the country’s forcible colonisation. She also reached back into an early, mythological past to create songs of healing. Maria Stadnicka’s work is likewise a place where institutional and state actions are examined – through the impacts on Romania’s population of Ceausescu’s and the Communist party’s rule. Specifically the ban on abortions, and the resultant filling of state orphanages, where over 10,000 children would contract HIV Aids. Like Annemarie, her work engages with great compassion, as well as creative strength, in bringing neglected experiences to the page and through this into our lives. 

Annemarie Ní Churreáin reading from ‘The Poison Glen’

And then it was my turn, to introduce and then perform the full sequence of the erasure poems in bird of winter. As I mentioned, you can see the video of us all, on the Stanza Poetry website until 31 March.  To speak out of my childhood darkness into the light and warmth of the Byre Theatre felt like an act of profound transformation.  Closing, I led a safeguarding exercise where we could join together, to honour the space we had made between us by our co-participation in the works shared by Annemarie, Maria and I. 

Once the event was over, and the book signings and warm conversations with the audience were all done, Annemarie and I realised how very urgently we needed coffee and cake to put ourselves back together. Heading out with our StAnza chair Robyn Marsack, we were stopped short by a broad rainbow. `It was rising like a realised wish up over the blue sea, that lay at the end of the street down which we were heading. In that moment, it seemed as if the light we had created together through our readings had assumed a visible form. 

Annemarie’s and my conversation was as warm as it was nurturing. After, I wanted to get myself out into the sea air and feel the hugeness of the beach backed by dunes. Walking across the sands, lit by runnels of water holding the last of the light, that sense of being supported by the living world stayed with me as the sun dropped and the sky dimmed to the glimmering purples and greys of a Scots mid March dusk.  The following morning, before and after seeing Emily Berry and Fiona Benson perform for the Poetry Book Society showcase, I discovered the ruined cathedral and stone-walled harbour, and climbed down onto the small enclosed beach below the ruins of the castle, where the water swirled in over the coarse granite sand and luxuriant seaweed. 

I had slept fitfully, still caught up in the energies of the places my poems had opened, but being out in the North Sea air dissipated those memories and helped me re-enter the present more fully.  Boarding the train south again, albeit with considerable regret, I took with me the certain knowledge that, through the sharing of our work, Annemarie NíáChurreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I had brought about an alchemical transformation that we and our audience would carry forward into new adventures.  

Below you can read the text of my performed set at StAnza, together with recordings of the individual erasures. Play them by clicking on the title as you read through. The video will be available until 31 March here: 

If anything you read is difficult for you, the Mind website has valuable resources. 

If you would like to read the erasure poems I have recorded on the page, they can be found in bird of winter via this link. 

Erasure: what we cannot say and how we say it : text of performance by alice hiller 

Is it possible to translate silencing back into sound? To voice complex experiences, we need first to access them.  As some of you know, bird of winter, offers creative witness to my childhood experience of being groomed and then sexually abused by my mother, but also of finding healing beyond this crime. Like many, who share my history, the impact of what was done to me meant I wasn’t able to talk about the abuse until my thirties.  

When I came to write about it in my fifties, through bird of winter, I found that making hand erasures created scratch cards through to my unconscious, and allowed some of the toughest, but also most needed, poems onto the page.  The erasures also generated the fractured narrative spine of the collection, as I’m going to show you, by reading them in sequence. 

Before that, I’ll say briefly how they came into being.  All bird of winter’s erasures grow from texts about Pompeii and Herculaneum, which have absorbed me since childhood.  As an adult, the eruption of Vesuvius, and subsequent, laborious excavations of materials buried under the volcanic rock and ash, became central to how I understand the slow, often dangerous, recovery of my buried past. 

Each of the erasures I’ll read was generated over a day, circling words and phrases, and blacking out, allowing the poem to emerge. I was letting my eye see, my hand move – before my mind could censor.  Working through texts read by many people, over the centuries, also gives communal witness to this global crime, which impacts millions of us. 

Visually, the erasures in bird of winter ask the reader to hopscotch from phrase to phrase. But even as the islands of words travel towards revelation and reclamation, they co-exist with the blacked out passages witnessing the unarticulated materials which are also present.  Reading today, I’ll tread carefully,  to keep us all safe.  If anything I speak about is difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to go. I’ll close with a short, grounding exercise, to bring us all securely back into the present. In the meantime, if in doubt, keep breathing!

Erasure is of course a function of trauma.   Our brains conceal or remove what is too dangerous for us to bear, especially when traumatic events occur when there is no support, as happens in the poem, ‘black river’, remembering my childhood. 

black river

when the fingers came
at night your weeds rose up

when the rocks arrived
you rushed my brain’s sluices

when the day returned
no hurt could surface

‘the stupendous task’, my first erasure in bird of winter, directly answers ‘black river’. From Herculaneum, Past Present and Future, it takes Charles Waldenstein’s demand for excavation of the site as the collection’s manifesto and call to arms:   

the stupendous task

 The second erasure,  ‘destruction impact landscape’ grew from the poet Martial’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius.  As it took shape, I realised the poem held its own before and after, divided at a midpoint, like mirrored reflections. Taken together they signal that something is not destroyed merely because it is attacked. 

destruction impact landscape

The next erasure,  ‘gardens fountains’, combines Columella’s and Flores’  descriptions of Pompeii and Herculaneum before the eruption.  Explorations of trauma often focus on the aftermath of the crime. It was important also to witness the unhurt place, or indeed the innocence of a child’s body, where ‘spring flowers blossom twice’:

gardens fountains

From this stronghold of beauty, we drop hard down into an underworld of darkness.  The next erasure, ‘eyewitness’ emerges out of a Times article from 1863.  Describing two figures revealed by pouring plaster into the voids left in the ash that fell over Pompeii, it also gave me a way to show my mother and I in her bed.  Like the excavations, these plaster casts are central to bird of winter’s understanding of how artworks manifest  out of voids or absences, and make visible what otherwise remains unseen. 

eye-witness

Coming next, ‘remove the solidified mix’, responds to the difficulties of creating bird of winter. It began as a description of  tunnelling down to the Villa dei Papyri during the eighteenth century in Herculaneum: Italy’s Buried Treasure. This work was often undertaken by convicts and forced labourers because of its risk.

remove the solidified mix

What happened down one of those eight hundred dark tunnels is documented in ‘and now came the ashes’, erased from a letter by Pliny the Younger. His description of Vesuvius erupting becomes also my mother and my eight year old self in a cottage in Wiltshire. I was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce this erasure which you can see and then hear below:

and now came the ashes

and now came the ashes

As you’ll see, the lineation of the  poem breaks down at its centre point, as my own life did following my father’s death in 1972.  Indeed, beyond the word “death”, there is no single or clear path forward, playing out how trauma refuses a conclusive act of narration but in its fragmentation draws us back and back. 

‘and now came the ashes’ is spoken by my child self, but bird of winter is in fact a dialogue between past and present.  Immediately afterwards, the sexual abuse I experienced is revisited in ‘this happened during winter’, erased from Seneca the Younger’s Natural Questions. Here, my adult self asks the reader for their empathetic engagement within a process of transformation:

this happened during winter

From this shared, mutually supported place, reader or listener and speaker can take their final steps down into the darkness of the repeated rape of a child by an adult, which is at the heart of bird of winter. ‘Gladiatorial training school’ works through an excavation report from 1766 to open a pathway to the deepest substrate of memory. 

gladiatorial training school

In “the hole/ the/ bolt/ passed” the secret assault by which my abuser controlled and subjugated me is finally out on the page. From there, only one more erasure is needed to guide us together, back up into the light. It’s from Fiorelli’s 1830 account of entering the ‘House of the Faun’, with additional words by classicists Alison E. Cooley, and M.G.L. Cooley.  

the house of the faun

As I end, I would like you all to place your feet firmly on the ground. Take some slow, comfortable breaths, in and out, holding in mind that “decoration/ in the shape of dogs/ gilded protecting deities/ with various colours and with gold leaf.” Breathing comfortably, we are passing together up from the underworld.  Greeting us is “a large festoon of flowers and fruit” created by our mutual solidarity – online and in this physical space.

Where silence is refused, healing can come. 
Thank you all for travelling with me today. 
When we stand together, we stand strong. 

The full source details of the erasures are credited in bird of winter.  My deepest thanks to those writers whose works I have used.

Thanks to Dr. Katie Ailes for the final photo.

If you would like to buy bird of winter to see the erasures on the page you can here.

‘When we stand together, we stand strong’ alice hiller by Dr. Katie Ailes

Welcoming back ‘the little cat’: holding and healing the hauntings and recurrences of childhood trauma within the artworks we make.

Trigger warning: non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse.

This has not been an easy blog to put together. I have written, and redrafted its plain sentences, bare as winter branches, but like winter branches, holding within them the promise of spring. For those of you who are thinking of reading further, I should warn you that I write honestly about the challenge of living with a complex history, and the fact that resolution can seem hard to find. But I work my way through these hard places, to arrive at a point of hopefulness, which you will hopefully also reach if you stay with me and with these words.

In life, as in art, we’re encouraged to think in terms of beginnings, middles and endings.  Progression and resolution give structure to stories. When an artwork responds to trauma, the requirements change.  Anyone who has experienced, or observed the impacts of traumatic events, knows that they continue to resonate and replay themselves for many years.  To generate a truthful creative transaction between a traumatic subject matter, and the work into which it is translated, calls for forms of expression which can suggest recurrences and hauntings.  Through this act of creative witness, we may begin to change their power and reposition our relationships to them.

Living beyond, and making art that responds to, my own experience of childhood sexual abuse, amongst other subjects, I face this challenge myself.  As the light dims towards the end of November, and the days grow shorter and darker, child ghosts walk again for me.  They remember and re-live my father’s death in hospital when I was eight, in 1972. These ghost-selves also re-experience the beginning of the penetrative sexual abuse to which I was subjected, very shortly after, when my mother, who was my abuser, and I moved from Brussels to Wiltshire.

Impacting both my physical and mental health, these hauntings can lead me to feel as if I am sinking down through waves of old sadness. Like heavy black sump oil, they seep into my thoughts and bodily movements. When things get really bad, they can make it hard to move – or even think.  Because this has happened every November and December since I was a teenager, over the years, I’ve developed resources to keep myself going.  I work beside my SAD light.  I try to be kinder to myself and organise my working life so that I am not too pressured.   I meditate, swim and walk my dog Ithaca, noticing the natural world around us.  I connect with people who love me. 

But all these strategies only ever mitigate the after-effects of the dreams which rise up at night.   In my sleep, I become again a scared, hurt child, taken back to a place between life and death by my mother. This was the case – very brutally – in November and December of 2021, as it had been in 2020, and all the years before that. 

None of us likes to speak of what we perceive as our vulnerabilities, for fear people will think less of us, or feel we are ‘seeking attention’ in some way. But in 2020, working on bird of winter‘s final manuscript alone with my dog Ithaca in lockdown, I decided to make an artwork that could enact being haunted by a traumatic past, and reaching beyond this towards a form of resolution. At the time, I was following an online workshop with Nina Mingya Powles around multiple language heritages with the Poetry School, which my fellow Forwards Shortlistee, Cynthia Miller, was also part of. I was also experiencing difficult dreams. They shaped what I wrote.

What emerged is called ‘je suis son petit chat il est mon papa 1972/ I am his little cat he is my daddy 2020’.  It’s a multi-form piece which exists simultaneously as a conventional poem, a visual work, a sound experience and a performance. It was published this January 22 in bath magg no 8, as you’ll be able to see and hear by following this link.

When I performed it at bath magg’s online launch, I began by saying a few words about the poem. The response I received made me feel there would be a value in expanding them into this blog, however inelegantly. Opening up the deliberately smudgy, troubled layers of the poem up in this way also gives me the opportunity to separate the two overlaid texts, and look at each one in isolation.  In the final print they are blurred across each other to play out how traumatic stories repeat and recur, as you’ll have seen from the fragment above, and the link to the full work at bath magg.

‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ begins in French and English, the two languages of my childhood. They refract and translate each other, but the work also makes complete sense in either language. In the first two lines, I’m waking up from a nightmare in 2020, aged fifty-six.  I’m also myself  in bed, aged eight, in 1972,  as my father lies dying in intensive care. From there it is back to 1972 and my eight year old self returning home to our flat: 

Underlay text of ‘je suis son petit chat’

Describing my life before my father died as if it was still simultaneously present, including my grandmother taking me to the hospital, and my father sending me drawings home, the narrative enacts how, in dissolving the boundaries of time, these dark hauntings also open opportunities for healing, by re-accessing a fuller range of memory. Next in the underlay text comes the nightmare at the heart of the poem, which invaded my sleep in the early hours of 22 November, replaying  the sexual abuse to which I was subjected as a child by my mother. As the poem reports, the terror of the dream induced vomiting and diarrhoea in my fifty-something year old self:  

Tough though it was to experience in reality, this act of voiding is also a release, which opens up ‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ to new energies – whereby the recurrence of the trauma becomes an opportunity to reset my relationship to the original events. Resetting happens through a short poem in both French and then English, which is overlaid on the looping narrative beneath it in larger font and bolder text, as the extract at the top of the blog shows. 

Within its overlaid phrases, my adult self summarises the impacts of my childhood sexual abuse, including how it continues to haunt me.  Speaking directly to my abuser, I refuse the silence which she imposed on me throughout my childhood and adolescence, and for long years beyond that. This frees the underlying narrative to begin to move towards the light of a different ending, where the recurrences of physical voiding can finally come to a stop: 

The account of the nightmare, and falling “down a black tunnel” is repeated below the overlaid text, as when in nursery rhymes like ‘Oranges and lemons’, or ‘Frère Jacques’ in French, the verses come round again.  Following the earlier shift, the act of voiding is once again purgative, letting go of some of the blackness and shame held inside me, and allowing gentler and more nurturing memories of my loving engagement with my father to continue to surface in the segment which follows: 

Like many others with my history, for long years the trauma of the penetrative abuse in childhood separated me from being able to feel my own feelings, or know my own wants. Here, they begin to return to the child who lives within and alongside the adult.  She can say once again “I want my daddy” and by expressing this longing re-form a more authentic connection with herself.  My grandmother’s phrase translated means “let her through, let her through, she’s his daughter”.  She was trying to get me allowed into the intensive care unit, but the phrase also acts out the way I am asking for my child self to be allowed back through, to speak and know herself, and how she was once loved. 

‘Je suis son petit chat/I am his little cat’ ends in a place of quietness, with the possibility of integrating my separated selves more fully. Translating the “petit chat” nickname my father gave me into the English “little cat”, and laying it down on the page, the poem performs an act of witness to the co-presence of my child and adult selves. It also documents how, by reconnecting more fully with child-alice, adult-alice is able to begin to make a new relationship what made us who we now: 

Walking in Shotover County Park near Oxford in the last days of 2021, after some very tough weeks, I saw trees and misty light that reminded me of Wiltshire, and felt unkind old ghosts crowd around me.  But breath by breath, I drew the damp, cold air of the present into my body, and with it new energy.  With each out-breath, I tried to let what I no longer needed pass from me.  As I did this, the pearlescence of the fields and clouds became a wilderness of beauty, and the black branches of the trees uplifted themselves into acts of elemental resistance.  With my dog Ithaca scenting the damp leaves, and pulling us forwards, and the landscape saying that life would return, I felt how this difficult annual recurrence was also a gateway to transformation – that each year I must find the way through.

The link to ‘je suis son petit chat’ at bath magg is here if you would like to hear or see the work again in its entirety. 

If you would like to buy bird of winter, please follow this link.  Poems from the collection are also available on the blog. 

If you need support after reading this blog, https://www.mind.org.uk/ has valuable links and helplines.

Further exploration: four books and StAnza Festival

I often set a creative prompt after exploring one of my own poems for people to explore in their own practice. In this case the subject material is too dangerous.  Instead, for anyone wanting to work creatively with complex materials, or look at other examples of this practice, I would recommend four books which open pathways to new understandings, and new creative forms of expression, from the breakages and fractures of trauma.  I would also recommend the other brilliant poems in bath magg no 8, many which respond to complex subject matters – and make from them acts of beauty and reclamation. 

In terms of books, Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin creates provisional, shifting structures to hold the lives and reposition the representations of Irish women whose lives were appropriated by the Irish State and Church.  Documenting how the State invaded every corner of life in Romania under Romania, under Ceausescu and the Romanian Communist Party, for Buried Gods Metal Prophets Maria Stadnicka and Antonia Glűcksman assemble a living memorial that incorporates diary entries, photos, erasures, quotes from statutes, and building plans, as well as more conventional ‘poems’.  In Things I have Forgotten Before Tanatsei Gambura speaks through radical formal innovation of what it can mean to have grown up as a “Black Girl” in Zimbabwe during the 1980s – and how losing a country can form you as much as having one. Sasha Dugdale’s extraordinary collection Deformations explores trauma and PTSD, through fragments composed around Homer’s Odyssey. A separate long sequence responds to the sculptor Eric Gill’s work and life, within the framework of his recorded sexual abuse of his daughters. Sasha and I spoke about our work in Volume 48 of PN Review. Sasha has a hugely impactful new poem in bath magg 8 which you can read here.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I will be appearing at the StAnza festival on 12 March both live and online with many other brilliant poets in St Andrews. You can find more details here. Prices start from £3.00. Booking opens on 21 January. For people not able to travel to Scotland, many of the events are online and very reasonably priced. As well as performing, I’m going to be sure to pack out my schedule with hearing other poets and it’s a great way to check in with a huge range of voices and perspectives.

 

‘Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing’: poems as pathways beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh.

On Saturday 6 November, I was asked to read and speak at an event on Poetry and Trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh 2021 with brilliant, radical poets Chaucer Cameron, Day Mattar and Tessay Foley, introduced by poet and academic Patricia Debney.  We have in common a background of having been subjected to predation and sexual abuse, in childhood or afterwards.  Our shared experience, and the fact that we have all made artworks which begin in this harsh place, set the stakes very high in terms of creating an event which could speak collectively to people with similar experience in their own histories. The link to the podcast follows further down.

Sixty-five people tuned in to join us mid-afternoon.  I don’t think anyone who was there will ever forget what was said and read. Both Chaucer and Day touched on their experiences of sex work or prostitution. Chaucer’s pamphlet In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered is part memoir/part fiction. It explores the impact of sex work on body, mind and spirit – through the voices of characters speaking to and with each other, while also questioning what it takes to leave this profession. Speaking of one of the female characters, who in real life was murdered, Chaucer said : “In my version she has her own voice, she sings her own song…and this is what it looks like.”  The same could be true of her performance of those extraordinary poems on 6 November. 

With real poignancy, and an ability to enter a child’s perspective, Day’s debut Springing from the Pews, with Broken Sleep Books, documents a six year old boy being groomed and then abused.  Interweaving confessions, journal entries, and multiple voices into a verse play, the poems follow this little boy into adult life, asking how we may live with, and beyond, this very difficult legacy. He explained “I struggled for a long time to write these poems… I had multiple voices in my head…responding each as loud as each other… contradictory, loving, manipulative.”  The results are astonishing.

Tessa Foley’s poems live in rooms where shadows rise up from the corners, even when the lights are on, and follow people down the streets at high noon.  Drawing both on family history, and her own experience of volunteering for three years at Portsmouth Rape and Abuse Counselling Centre, the poems of What Sort of Bird Are You? witness the greatest difficulties, but also document moving beyond them into a more hopeful and resilient spaces, engendered in part through acts of mutual solidarity and community. Her line “Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing” could speak for us all. 

My own text is given in full below, exploring the idea of trauma as a wound, and how we may heal beyond it. I chose poems relating to water, to honour Aldeburgh’s seaside setting. To hear Chaucer’s, Day’s and Tessa’s voices testifying to experiences which I felt in my own body and spirit, had my heart rushing before I ever got to my own set. I was hugely honoured to perform with them. Inevitably, I needed to rebalance myself afterwards. Walking by the Thames later that afternoon, allowing the present world back into me as dusk deepened, I saw a footbridge lit up over the dark water. Watching it, I felt as if I had been given a visual representation of how we had, through our works, lit safe passages over places where we had once known great suffering.

You can hear the podcast of Chaucer Cameron, Day Matar, Tessa Foley and I reading together here which Poetry in Aldeburgh have just released.

If anything is difficult for you, the Mind website has helpful links.

As the set was an hour long, and very intense, I decided to record the audio of my poems and words separately as well – for people who wanted a shorter listen, or who might be hesitant around exposing themselves to the longer experience of the full set. The performance and comments from the audience set twitter alight for hours and days afterwards. My individual recording is 15 minutes long. I have put the linking text I wrote below it as a guide to what to expect.

audio link to alice hiller’s Poetry in Aldeburgh ‘healing beyond trauma’ set of poems.

To give a flavour of my approach, the words I wrote to link the poems are reproduced below in italics, interspersed by the poem titles. ‘phare d’ailly’ is reproduced as a sample of my work, because it has appeared in PN Review, along with a description of discovering ancient Herculaneum by Scipio Maffei. You can hear all the poems in full on the recording. If you face hearing challenges please contact me through the blog and I can send you a full text of words and poems.

If you would like to buy bird of winter, it’s available here.

alice hiller words and water poems on healing beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh:

As many of you know, trauma means wound in ancient Greek. My own collection, bird of winter, is partly about the childhood wound of being groomed and sexually abused by my mother.   But it’s also about healing, and opening our wings into wider, freer skies.  I’ll alternate poems which explore my difficult early years with others honouring experiences that helped me reclaim life.  Celebrating Aldeburgh, many of the poems include water.  First up is ‘bains de mer’ or ‘sea swimming’, remembering my beloved French bonne maman or grandmother.

bains de mer [performed]

Bonne maman represented a space of safety and unconditional love.  Because my mother was my abuser, danger remained omnipresent. Normandie is the backdrop to a photo taken by my father in ‘pistil’. Named for the female reproductive parts of a flower, the poem combines words from my childhood medical notes with direct memories. 

pistil [performed]

In addition to my medical notes,  bird of winter is framed by Pompeii and Herculaneum. Both were harbour towns, but water is not a place of refuge or safety in the abuse poems.  ‘let none of this enter you’ is spoken to my four or five year old self – with extra lines by Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius, which shapes bird of winter. 

let none of this enter you [performed]

Even though he worked long hours, my diplomat father had been my protector.  Once he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when I was six, power shifted.  I was eight when he died and my mother and I moved from Brussels, to England.  I saw my father as the lighthouse whose beams lit my bedroom in Normandie. 

phare d’ailly

papa the tide at vasterival was going out 
when you were carried from our flat as I slept

your jaw swung
open like a latchless door

the sea is now 1km from the site of pompeii 

The penetrative abuse began in England.  My erasure ‘and now came the ashes’ is from  Pliny the Younger’s account of Vesuvius

and now came the ashes [performed]

Traumatic events such as rape fracture our consciousness.   Scipio Maffei’s 1747 account of excavating Herculaneum offered a way of suggesting the injuries arising from raping a child, along with the difficulties of voicing this. The reader gets to puzzle out the imagery.  They can determine how far to engage. 

proceeding blindly through
tunnels and through narrow
passages much will be broken
much will be destroyed
nor will it ever be possible
to see the noble buildings
in their entirety

Scipio Maffei 1747

Even in very difficult times, the memory of my father, and my bonne maman’s love, gave my spirit a space of nurture.  This is critical for all of us who are subjected to wounding experiences.  ‘Rue de l’aurore’ was my grandmother’s address in Brussels. It means street of the dawn.

rue de l’aurore [performed]

I escaped the physical element of the abuse when I was thirteen by  stopping eating.   I was admitted to hospital – but this was 1977.  Eating disorders were not recognised as a possible indicators of childhood sexual abuse.  I wasn’t asked about, or able to speak directly of, what my mother had done.  The psychiatrist who saw me understood something terrible had happened.  Writing ‘tesselation’,  I instinctively sited myself between worlds, like water becoming vapour. 

tessellation [performed]

My mother ended all contact with this psychiatrist when I was released from hospital.  I was left very vulnerable.  With time, I reconnected with life and love again and began to reclaim my body. My final poem  moves between capture and release, remembering when I was seventeen. 

becoming your channel of pearl [performed]

I dedicate it to all of us who turn our faces to the light, no matter what darkness we have come through [end of set].

The Festival brought together a rainbow of poets from Andrew McMillan, Sean Hewitt, Kim Moore, Victoria Kenneflick, Dom Bury, Colette Bryce, Rachel Long, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Momtaza Mehri and Sarah Westcott, to name but a few. The podcasts will be up on the Poetry in Aldeburgh website over the next days. I really recommend checking in with them.

If you live in or near London, I’ll be performing live for Outspoken at the Southbank with Nick Mahona and Wayne Holloway-Smith on Thursday 25 November at 7.45 pm. I’ll be sharing poems about the bumpy teenage years that follow grooming and childhood sexual abuse, but also how these are the freedom trail that leads to reclamation and healing.

Tickets are here for Outspoken on 25/11/21 at 19.45 at the Southbank.

Multiple Ways into Words: Celebrating Being on the Forwards Prizes First Collection Shortlist of 2021

Caleb Femi, alice hiller, Holly Pester, Ralf Webb, Cynthia Miller

When you’re a debut poet, aged 57, you don’t necessarily expect to find your name on a prize list. I certainly didn’t.  I was overwhelmed when I discovered my bird of winter had made the first collection shortlist for the Felix Dennis Award of the Forwards Prizes.  Even more so when I found out that I had been selected alongside Caleb Femi, Cynthia Miller, Holly Pester, and Ralf Webb.  They are all poet-heroes of mine, whose work I had loved, and followed live, and online.  We have all been interviewed on the Forwards Prizes website, where you can also read about the poets selected for Best Poem, and Best Collection. The Best Poem list includes Natalie Linh Bolderston, who I interviewed on this blog talking about the family heritages and creative influences which shape her art-making.

Over the last week, in the run up to the Forwards Prizes Ceremony at the Southbank on Sunday 24 October, Wasafiri Magazine and The Poetry School have both published work about our Debut Collection shortlist as a group.  I wanted to take the opportunity to share it here, to celebrate us together as the shortlist of 2021. I also wanted to reflect my sense of how crucial Caleb’s, Cynthia’s, Holly’s and Ralf’s collections are, and how much they mean to me personally, as someone who has read and re-read them over the summer. No five poets can ever say everything, but between us we have a wide reach – geographically, creatively, and in terms of our subject matters – and share a commitment to making new work that speaks from deep places in ourselves and lives.

To read what Caleb, Cynthia, Holly, Ralf and I have to say about our work, please follow this link to the poet Shash Trevett’s insightful interview with us for Wasafiri Magazine.

By way of a taster, Shash’s questions throw light on how each of us wrote, and where we wrote from, amongst other topics. Physically – Holly Pester said in the bath, as well as elsewhere, and also from “My small intestine. My dreams. My lunch breaks.”  She also came up with a definition of making work which captures the experimental, provisional force of this adventure.

Holly:  “‘Tussle’ is a very good word for describing what writing poetry is; words, idea, time, speech, language, text, hormones, affections, all moving towards the recovery of a new thought in a barely held communion. It is a tussle! (It grew over about three years). “

Cynthia Miller spoke of writing from her mother’s Chinese Malaysian heritages – “I think of the long tradition of fortune tellers at temples. Star-charts and fortune sticks and divining the placement of the heavens.” She explained how this fed into work about displacements and migrations: “all the poems in my collection about stars are really poems about family, longing and displacement (such as ‘Scheherezade’, ‘Summer Preserves Haibun’, ‘Proxima b’), and how acute and destabilizing that feeling of disorientation can be.”  

Caleb Femi’s words bring out how his debut, like his film-making, speaks from a place of multiplicity and open-hearing:

Shash – “In ‘Barter’ you write ‘I was reaching for my voice box / I rarely use it to its full potential’. Can you talk about lending your voice to those who cannot speak anymore, or who are voiceless?” 

Caleb: “My voice is one of many that exists in my community. Each as intriguing as the other, we should all be heard. ” 

Ralf Webb made his explanation of the colour pink expressive of the range of tones and moods and slip-sliding transitions that his work encompasses – always with an eye to how our lives stack up ,and the social and political constructs which inform the shapes they take and make.

Ralf: “When I think of the colour pink I think of carnations, earthworms, anemic-looking plums; I think of the huge rose quartz crystals on my childhood bedroom windowsill; I think of pink moons and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon; I think of hematology and bone marrow biopsies; I think of Pepto-Bismol, pills, the skin under the nail; I think of how the sunrise would have looked to my parents, alone, driving to or back from work at dawn.”

Finally, I added some thoughts on “form” in its wider sense:

alice: “I use form to confer agency, even while navigating danger.  I drop the reader down, somatically, into the terror of my childhood, but offer ladders out…  Form also embodies childish play and mess. Some poems circle round. Within the erasures, white tunnels of words are dug out from smudgy, hand-blacked rectangles.  Elsewhere you have to puzzle out the links between the historical fragments as you jump from one to another – like stepping stones or hopscotch. Those sorts of engagements help generate active, empathetic readings.” 

Ralf, Holly and I also each wrote a ‘how we did it’ blog for the Poetry School, where I’ve taken many classes as my collection bird of winter found its wings.

My link is here, on writing ‘elegy for an eight year old’.

Ralf’s is here on writing ‘Love Story Discourse Goblins.

And Holly’s is coming shortly.

Romalyn Ante interviewed Cynthia and I on writing debut collections for the first episode of ‘Tsaa with Roma’, which also features chats over tea with Sasha Dugdale and Liz Berry. You can watch here.

Meantime, if you’d like to go deeper with any of the poets the shortlist, click their links below. Caleb’s includes links to his films.

Caleb Femi

Cynthia Miller

To see more examples of Holly Pester’s work at Granta.

Read Ralf’s Webb’s experience of writing here.

If you’d like to see the five of us live on stage together, on Sunday 24 of October at the Southbank, live and streamed tickets are available.

Book Livestream tickets here.

Book Southbank Centre in person tickets here.

Buy the Forwards Anthology here.

‘We know that the year – and more – of the pandemic was also the year of reading. And that means poetry as well as prose. It was a time when everyone was reminded how much we need to be exposed to the power of the imagination. And the short lists for the Forward Prizes 2021 are a reminder that the poetic imagination isn’t wholly introspective, although it cuts deep. It’s bold, limitless in ambition and it touches every part of our lives – our own hopes and fears, our communities, and the wider world that so often seems bewildering and over-powering. These poets find pathways into the deepest feelings and discover vantage points that take a reader (or a listener) to another place. In their hands we look at the world differently. This is a moment for poetry; and all these poets deliver. Read them, and take off.’

– James Naughtie, The chair of the 2021 Forward Prizes jury

“As long as the body is moving/ the heart will follow”: Troy Cabida on how “tenderness becomes a strength” when writing into the bi-cultural, bi-queer British-Filipinx space – and how he is taking to the skies with his Bad Betty debut ‘War Dove’ despite lockdown.

Troy-18Troy Cabida is the first poet I have had the privilege of interviewing about ‘saying the difficult thing’ in their work during lockdown, and the second librarian poet in this spot, following on from Karen Smith last year. Troy tuned into poetry while still at school (further details below) and has shared with us a live recording of his poem ‘In Conversation with Past Troy’ to a backing track by Gabriel Jones of Bump Kin, from which the title quote is taken. If you want to carry Troy’s live voice in your ears alongside our conversation about War Dove, Troy’s debut with Bad Betty Press, published on 2 May 2020, click on the link here  now. 

Like Romalyn Ante, who also spoke with me, Tagalog was Troy’s first language. Romalyn and Troy both choose to write in English at present. Troy is originally from Las Piñas City, Metro Manila, but is currently based close to me in southwest London, which makes us both neighbours of the magnificent Brompton Cemetery. Built as a Victorian burial ground, with flamboyant avenues of tombs, it has over time also become an impromptu nature reserve, and was a legendary queer hang-out in the 1970s and early 1980s before HIV/AIDS took hold, which works for us both as out bi-queer poets. Had social distancing not been in force, we would might well have hung out in its café for the interview.

Photo 10-04-2020, 18 20 31Widely published in Bukambibig, harana, TAYO Literary, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Macmillan,   Troy was a member of two legendary London co-operatives, the Barbican Young Poets, and Roundhouse Poetry Collective, which previously nurtured Belinda Zhawi and Dean Atta, amongst other distinguished poets. Belinda’s and Dean’s interviews also feature in this series and tutor and poet Rachel Long’s is also available. 

While he has not neglected his own career, Troy has also been generous to other emerging and established talents, editing The Murmur House and Síblíni Journal as senior editor and Issues 3-7 of the Thought Notebook by Thought Collection Publishing. He is also editor for 30 Days Dry by Chicago poet-playwright Robert Eric Shoemaker. A notable and powerful live performer, as a producer, Troy’s projects include London open mic night Poetry and Shaah, his debut headline show Overture: An Evening with Troy Cabida, Poems for Boys,  a night that gives space for male-identifying poets to talk about their relationships with masculinity and Liwayway, an open mic night and art collective bringing together UK-based Filipinx creatives spearheaded by Jessica Manuel for British-Filipinx poets, singers and rappers.

Photo 25-03-2019, 19 41 08
Rachel Long

As a fellow poet who, like Troy, identifies as bi and queer, and also carries two languages in my psychic toolkit, not to mention a whole load of supplementary musical and other inspirations, it was really powerful for me to hear what Troy had to say about his own experiences of realising these doubled aspects of his identity, and negotiating them relative to his private, public and creative selves.   I was also really drawn to hearing how the extraordinary poems in War Dove, his debut pamphlet just launched with Bad Betty, found their voices and forms, within the context of both London, and the wider world, including through some targeted “binge-watching’ of the series Sorry For Your Loss, and how the poems fuse the multiple languages and registers through which Troy speaks to us all.

AH:     Can you tell me about your path into poems Troy? When and why did you start writing and performing?

TC:       I was introduced to poetry back in 2010, through a blue GCSE English anthology everyone in my generation will probably remember with utmost emotion. We studied Derek Walcott, John Agard, Carol Ann Duffy and I remember specifically a worksheet highlighting poetry techniques like the simile and the enjambment and how they work within a poem. I experimented writing when I got home that same day and fell in love.  I started submitting my poems for publication after I left sixth form, around 2013, and started doing working as an editor for several journals and manuscripts to get myself acquainted with how poetry works as a collaboration rather than something purely solitary. It’s great because turns out, there were people that liked my work and accepted them into their publications, many of which I highly regard.My first experience performing was at the open mic night BoxedIn back in 2016. I remember my performance was so stiff, but I just knew where to go from there to become a better reader, and I owe that confidence to the hosts Sean Mahoney, Amina Jama and Yomi Ṣode, who have and continue to curate a night that listens to poets but also challenges them to be better. I initially found performing to be daunting because I didn’t know how to place myself within it but then found it fun and a way to get an immediate response for your poems. An audience can be a very good sounding board.

AH:     Were there any poets, songwriters or other creative figures who made this seem more possible? I know you have been part of the Barbican Poets and Roundhouse collective.

pascale freeword centre
Pascale Petit reading from her forthcoming collection ‘Tiger Girl’ at the Free Word Centre

TC:     I’m lucky to call the Barbican Young Poets and Roundhouse Poetry Collective strong support systems in this crazy poetry scene. Being a member of both programmes taught me about community and knowing how to work and give parts of yourself to create a tight unit. I have to shout out Jacob Sam-La Rose, Rachel Long, Bridget Minamore and Cecilia Knapp, who are all amazing. I get a dopamine rush every time they say something nice about my work.  In terms of poets, I really admire Joseph Legaspi, Pascale Petit, Richard Scott, Amina Jama, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Natalie Linh Bolderston, Helen Bowell, Andrew McMillan, R.A. Villanueva, Romalyn Ante, Kayo Chingonyi, Terrance Hayes and Chen Chen. I always find myself going back to their work. Then musicians like Karylle, (((O))), Curtismith, Janelle Monáe, Bamboo, The Corrs, She’s Only Sixteen and Yolanda Moon. I’m a huge fan of BTS. “Interlude: Calico” is written after their song “Serendipity”.

I binged on a Facebook Watch series called “Sorry For Your Loss” starring Elizabeth Olsen when I was drafting the poems, and I loved and studied the show so much that it ended up being a huge influence on the overall manuscript. Its execution of someone’s emotional journey from a major event, in this case the death of the lead’s husband, was handled with both logic and heart that I was inspired to follow that route with this pamphlet.

AH:     Your epigraph is in Tagalog, from a song by the indie folk Filipino band Ben&Ben, whose debut was out in May 2019.   What made you choose this as the launch pad for your work?

TC:     Thank you for catching that! It’s from their song “Lucena”, which I first heard around October 2019, around the time I was going through the manuscript by myself before Amy began working on it. Through that time, I couldn’t help but feel an emotional distance between myself and the poems as majority of them were written in 2017 and 2018 and studying them from that perspective dawned to me how different I am now from the person who wrote those poems.   I chose “Lucena” because it sings about the joy in letting go, in hitting the ground running after a long time of hurt, which I felt would work as the epigraph as it reflects where I was emotionally at the time of the pamphlet’s release.

AH:    As a dual language speaker, I don’t translate or italicise the French words I use in my work because I want to reflect the way that my mind doesn’t give primacy to

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Victoria Adukwei Bulley

any single language. L. Kiew, who I have also interviewed for this series, follows the same approach. What was your thinking around this decision for the epigraph?

TC:       I chose “Lucena” because it does so many things at the same time. I have this fantasy in my mind that when people read the lyrics, they’ll get curious and check the song out and then get a feel of its message and sound, which is anthem-like, like feet stamping and voices cheering. Starting the pamphlet in Tagalog is my way of letting the reader know that although the poems are in English, it’s still a second language to me, and that my relationship with Tagalog heavily informs my relationship with English. I often call English my “work language” and that I get tired of speaking it after 11pm. True story.  Also, R.A. Villanueva was once asked how his readers will understand his work if he doesn’t translate his Tagalog into English and he answered with a picture of Chewbacca. Now, I may not be the most prolific of Star Wars fans, but I share the exact sentiment.

AH:       The title of the opening poem, ‘Ladlad’ is glossed as “From Tagalog – unfolded; spreading out on a surface; to expose;” .  To the English ear, it reads initially as a twinned or dual male identity, like a doubled lad. The poem refracts a shifting expression of identities:

you stretching
out of yourself, your wrists bending
at the sides of a box struggling to contain you,
translates to you falling from somewhere high,
reminder that you are unpolished quartz,
your sense of a man cracked for wanting man
as if to say:
you deserve all that is twisting your heart,
all that is crushing your torso.

 It has an almost biblical feel – as if a new definition of masculinity, in a different shape to what has gone before, is being formed through and claimed in words, albeit not without great struggle, reflected in the stone imageries. Was that process in your mind while you were writing?

TC:          I was speaking to my dad about a friend who had come out publicly which I admired. We were speaking about it purely in Tagalog and it took me a second after we finished to realise that the word we used for “coming out” can be interpreted as derogatory.  When taken out of the LGBTQ+ context, “ladlad” means to spread an item so it is entirely visible, or to force the truth out of someone. To constantly use this word to describe that process made me feel uncomfortable, and then realising how it can even parallel with how Filipino culture perceives being gay: an immoral truth that can’t help but be a truth, but something others have the freedom to punish you for.   ‘Ladlad’ chews and squeezes the juice out of that word, uncovering any silenced or repressed emotions and associations that it passes down to people. In the context of the pamphlet, it being the first poem takes the reader straight into the psyche of the narrator, who is in the middle of this ocean of confusion and isolation that they have grown to believe that they deserve.

AH:        That’s a really moving explanation Troy.  Thank you.    Mary Jean Chan, Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Jay G. Ying are other poets who are currently making work that explores the negative impacts of societal hostility on the queer identity.  They

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Bridget Minamore

also claim the idea of the queer self as a place of cultural regeneration and onward transmission of new and different possibilities. Is that a project that also speaks to you?

TC:          I believe it’s really important for artists to create work that is true to themselves, as well as it is important to consume art made by those who live those experiences. Too many times I’ve read poems about the queer experience written by straight poets as a prompt for them to experiment with and it doesn’t sit well with me.   I used to have this idea that I shouldn’t be writing about my experiences of being bisexual because, for some reason, I didn’t think they’d fit the mould of what can pass as bisexual narrative. But then you try to ignore that thought and hope that someone reads your work and feel a little less alone.

AH:      Speaking from my own experience, I know that bisexual self can be a scary one to claim, not least because you fear hostility and negative judgements from all quarters!  I was terrified, joining Mary Jean Chan’s Queer Studio online course with the Poetry School, in case I would be rejected by more ‘purely queer’ poets.  But in fact the space was intensely freeing and supportive, and gave me an audience for whom I could write first drafts of poems about a relationship I had with a girl my own age when we were both teenagers – which was a seminal and reclamatory experience for me after I experienced same sex abuse in childhood.

Turning back to your work Troy, the poem ‘Hawk and dove’ continues a work of re-forming. It fuses poetry and martial arts, remembering “when I tried to punch you/ with a hand boxed like a rock/ only to see it crack open on impact.” Where there could have been harm, there is instead transformation and co-existence – “Fist bouncing from chest/ feather meeting concrete”.   Do you envisage language as having the capacity to operate in this fluid, shifting way?

TC:        I think poetry can break rules that other forms of language can’t. Poetry is often an artform where you can do that and then the craft reverts to freshness rather that disrespecting it. Jacob would always teach us to know the rules of a specific form, and then he’ll encourage us to break it apart if it serves the poem.   I imagined “Hawk and dove” to be about the playing of foils and how opposites can melt into one another. For me, it’s a nostalgic look into a relationship between polar Photo 25-03-2019, 15 05 55opposites: where the first stanza focuses on a dominant and physical figure, the second stanza is about the more pensive counterpart. Having both stanzas hold six lines each, to me, meant that they were still standing on equal grounds even though they were different.    In a normal situation, the “fist bouncing from chest” would have resulted in pain and then a cue to retreat, but in this instance, this clash becomes a gateway into a deeper relationship, where you can see “flickers of your eyes from mine to the ground”, and then the two personalities mix and learn from one another.

AH:     ‘The Afters of After’ is a coming out poem, which called to mind Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s voice, albeit that the outcome is very different.   Here the kitchen is homely – “moist from steam and cigarette smoke and white wine” – and the parents appear to be understanding:

They refer to a friend’s son, whose name was meant for me. Paul.
Remember him? He works in Malta now. He’s bisexual too!

 As the bisexual mum of a queer son, I had my own experience of this, when he came out to me in his teens, only for me to come out back to him. It was a very emotional but very beautiful experience for us both, that continues to inform our adult relationship. It seems to me that this is a very important exchange to record for other young LGBTQ+ people – to give them hope and confidence about revealing themselves to their families. Was this part of your intention within the poem?

TC:   That’s such a beautiful anecdote that you’ve shared. Thank you for sharing that, Alice.   When I was editing “War Dove”, I knew that I would be dealing with personal themes, and thankfully I’ve been able to add in experiences of levity into my poems because while there has been negative aspects to my process of coming out, there has been lighter stories that I can share, which I think should be celebrated. Coming out is an experience that has facets of both good and bad, and poetry has the ability to narrate all of that. One of the stanzas in “Makeup and heels and Reece King” came about because the first thing my friend Idil asked me upon finding out I’m bisexual, was my opinion on this model named Reece King. It was in an escalator in Debenhams.

In terms of my parents, I’m also so thankful that they’ve been supportive. It wasn’t always the case with them growing up, but it’s definitely something that’s changed. The moment I captured in my poem is my parents grasping the fact that their son has finally come out, after years of holding his breath, and they’re getting used to the idea that they finally can talk about this thing in front of them and the first story they manage to bring to the table is how their high school friend’s son is also bisexual, which I found so awkward then but really funny looking back now. From then on, our relationship has relaxed, my parents have spoken more and more, and I’ve felt comfortable working on becoming more open with them.

However, I understand that coming out to family, or anyone for that matter, is a concept that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and I totally see my privilege in having an accepting inner circle. Coming out or voicing out this aspect of your identity should be done whenever you are most emotionally ready. Do it for yourself and do it in service of your growth and healing.

AH:   Poems including ‘Buddy’, ‘Bonds’ and ‘Interlude: Calico’ give witness to the complexity of inhabiting a queer identity in a predominantly heterosexual world, and also to the sense of alienation and separation which can sometimes arise even when seeking to form queer relationships or simply enjoy more casual connections. In ‘Bonds’ the speaker uses the disjunct of a stanza break to state “Man, I have a feeling // we’re not watching the same thing.” Was this an area that you felt drawn to exploring?

TC:   I once heard someone say that poems about sex shouldn’t just talk about sex as it can become one dimensional, and I took that in, when drafting ‘Buddy’. I wanted it to be about the defence mechanisms we’re not aware of creating, due to loneliness. Oftentimes toxic relationships are born out of the desire to shut out parts of ourselves that we don’t want to deal with. Sometimes those kinds of relationships exacerbate those exact parts and when they come out, it’s in ways that they shouldn’t, which causes more damage.  ‘Bonds’ is a poem that I took the longest to edit because of the ending, where the poem jumps from the narrator to the subject, the person that the voice is sitting next to. It’s about dynamics in a relationship can develop because of unrequited love and an inability to heal past that.  Where “Buddy” uses couplets to indicate two people’s close connection, the subjects in “Bonds” have a barrier that keeps them from fully connecting, which I wanted to highlight through the three-line stanzas. The sudden shift is abrupt and uncomfortable because that’s another voice altogether and it’s a wakeup call back into reality, one that’s hard to accept because it’s not the reality that you want to be in.

roma reading poetry london
Romalyn Ante reading ‘Names’ at the Poetry London autumn launch at Kings Place.

AH:   Romalyn Ante writes in her poems of the sense of unreality which can arise from her Filipino heritage and identity being portrayed in crassly simplified terms by the European and American media. The opening stanza of ‘Examples of Confusion’ suggests the danger of becoming party to a news and entertainment media which marginalises and diminishes non-white experiences:

You can laugh through floods and earthquakes and dictators
but your heart cracks easy for emotions? You’re losing colour.

The action cuts between the speaker and his friend in a UK Costa, a vignette of family life in Manila, and a close up of the American actor Timothée Chalamet, when the camera is “romancing yet another scrunched up white boy forehead.” Chalamet made his name in Call Me by Your Name, but could be one of many young white male pin ups.  Would you like to say something about this poem?

TC:   Oftentimes, being Filipino means carrying a certain pressure to uphold a stereotype that we’re the happiest culture in the world, something that American media has perpetuated for so long. And to criticise that means I’m ungrateful for having what has been called a “positive stereotype”. It’s ridiculous because the conversation about mental health issues has been deeply vilified and buried in taboo, leaving many people confused and in need of a professional, which should be a solution as logical as seeing a doctor for a physical illness.

‘Examples of Confusion’  tackles my unrest about this situation of growing up in a culture that teaches us that it’s better to sweep things under a rug and weather the storm with a smile than admit that we’re actually struggling, which denies us human substance and depth. It’s really dangerous because it does get to the point where Filipinos grow up thinking we don’t even get mental health problems, that things like anxiety and depression are just for white people, which is far from the truth. The stanza about Timothée Chalamet’s performance came about because I had reached a point where I was able to feel more heard through art produced by non-Filipinos, which bothered me because I know I can’t say that that story is truly mine to compare with.  It’s funny because digging deep, deep into Filipino art and media outside of the mainstream circuit that encourages these stereotypes rather than challenging them, I managed to find like-minded artists who make work that I can 100% empathise with. And the biggest criticism they get is that they’re too radical or that they’re too ungrateful to appreciate what we already have.

AH:  ‘War Dove’, the title poem, draws many of your pamphlet’s themes together:

I’ve come to know the kind of tender
that packs muscle, that doesn’t cower
even to my own desires.
In front of the face that profits from my labour
but doesn’t know how to give back,
the doves around me fought to remain.

 You express a form of reclamation enacted in the teeth of harsh treatment and continuing adversity –  “the understanding of the apology, / the need for it to be verbalised and accepted/ to release the victim of their past”. What was in your mind when you were writing and revising this?

TC:  Whenever I read this poem out to an audience, I always mention how much of this poem isn’t trying to solve the problem against violence or toxic masculinity, but it’s rather thinking through those things and wondering what it can do internally to stop becoming a part of the problem, if such an act can ever be truly done.  The first stanza is after “Trevor” by Ocean Vuong, where he says that “tenderness depends on how little the world touches you”. I agreed with that for a long time until I started to realise that when you’re put in a situation where you can retaliate after being wronged, it’s actually perfectly okay to ignore the voices that push you to fight back and just remain still. Practicing compassion after being punched in the face. The idea that the world can beat you up and your response to that is to accept and find strength in the tender state that you’re left in makes as much sense to me as Ocean Vuong’s line does. And then tenderness becomes a strength, which defies the idea that the two can’t be synonymous with one another.  The third stanza was very fun to write because it was my attempt in understanding the concept of forgiveness, an action that hasn’t been truly perfected yet, in my opinion. It puts something so emotionally driven in a logical perspective because it’s looking for something that can’t be found through that emotional route. I grew up in a community where forgiveness is a hazy and mystical thing that you must experience and to give it concreteness, reasoning for its validity and actual steps to follow is somehow taboo and disrespectful, which I find so interesting.

AH:     As someone who was subject to sustained sexual abuse by a family member in childhood, forgivenesss and compassion are things about which I have thought often –  though without yet fully reaching resolution, I must admit.    I really value the subtlety and rigour of your thought in this respect Troy, particularly because I try to follow a daily Buddhist meditation practice which can generate a freedom to renegotiate my relationship with my past, without surrendering agency.  Your idea of how we can allow tenderness to become strength is very powerful and beautiful.

I’d like to close our page conversation by asking how it feels to launch your debut in lockdown?   Will you be doing some live events to share the work when it becomes possible for venues to open again?

TC:       So I’m launching the pamphlet online on Bad Betty Press’ Instagram Live and I’m sharing it with an amazing poet named Gabriel Akamọ with his own debut pamphlet called At The Speed of Dark.    We joked about how our pamphlets will make poetry history by being one of the publications released during the lockdown.    I was having a conversation with another poet friend about how the lockdown has affected the poetry scene and he said that despite not being together physically, the support between us have only gone stronger and have adapted to the tides. Moving our launch into the digital space is still as exciting as it would be on a venue because it means more people can watch alongside our community, watching at the comfort of their own homes. I’ve been contacting nights for a possible feature slot with them at the start of the year so I hope we can get those off the ground when it’s safe to do so.  I’m a co-producer for an open mic night called Poetry and Shaah with Neimo Askar, Fahima Hersi, Abdullahi Mohammed, Ayaan Abdullahi and Idil Abdullahi and when we’re all able to resume our normal shows, we’ll only go upwards from there. I’m asking them for a feature spot to help promote the pamphlet, so fingers crossed they say yes!

AH:   Thank you very much for talking to me so generously, and so insightfully, Troy Cabida.    We’re launching this interview after your launch, the thinking being that readers would already have joined you, Gabriel Akamọ, and your brilliant support acts, in the live event, the facebook link for which is here.   I’m also placing links to the publications and live videos we’ve discussed below this for our readers to follow, and most importantly, the buy button link to Bad Betty so they can get themselves their own copy of War Dove through the mail, and bring it along for you to sign when performances are able to take place in shared physical spaces again.   

To buy Troy Cabida’s pamphlet War Dove from Bad Betty click here.

To check out more of Troy Cabida’s work, a few links to click on.

Troy Cabida’s website.

New poem from BathMagg

harana poetry for the poem Ladlad.

Bukambibig here.

Tayo Literary

Ink Sweat and Tears

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

Slam: You’re Gonna Want to Hear This

Liwayway

Poems for Boys

Overture: An Evening with Troy Cabida.