O4 May 2O21

Running from Something, Looking for Something: photographic artist Jonathan Liu drives deep into the Icelandic glacier to capture the mystery of the sublime


A dirt road stretches out into the distance. Its miles, yet untraversed, point towards mountains far on the horizon and the landscape rolls away on all sides. Here begins Running from Something, Looking for Something, a series of photographs by Jonathan Liu... read more


8 Jun 2O2O

Health Is Wealth by Katie – New York-based fashion consultant Katie Cervini is on a mission to demystify women’s health


Health Is Wealth is a new blog from New York-based fashion consultant Katie Cervini, who writes about women’s health in a way that is refereshingly human. It is an open space for conversation with tips founded on Katie’s own wealth of knowledge to help women get to know their bodies, their health and the science behind it… read more


6 May 2O2O

Isolation 2020: ‘It’s whatever you want it to be’ – creative photographer Kirsty Marshall creates a montage of lockdown messages to explore what it means to live in isolation


We are stuck, in a way the world has not experienced before, inside our homes. The pubs are closed. The nine-to-five is working from home, in furlough or redundant. The planes are grounded, the trains are empty and the cars only start when they have to. The world we knew has stopped but, for the first time, we’re in it together. For the first time, we are joined together as a planet in experiencing a global pandemic, and that is difficult to comprehend. There are almost no words for it… read more


18 Aug 2O19

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)


The voice over the moving image suggests there is a story to tell, as though actors are following directions around a set and therefore moving towards a common cause – that of narrative. However, as we watch the film, we soon become aware of the director’s lack of authority and control over the people, vehicles and objects that move in, through and out of the frame… read more


4 May 2O18

Recipe for Being a Woman
by Hermione Cameron


Recipe for Being a Woman is a playful and pithy debut collection from a poet whose awareness and grip on language allows her to create a concise and deeply ironic sense of being in the world. Hermione Cameron speaks of, to and for the modern age in 28 poems, in which she shows us the world anew, as if standing on our heads… read more


14 May 2O18

Darker With the Lights On
by David Hayden


Darker With the Lights On is a collection of 20 short stories by David Hayden, a prolific writer of short fiction, published by Little Island Press. With an abundance of imagination through surreal and unbounded worlds beyond and the beneath the world we inhabit, Darker With the Lights On is like taking a train in the dark, the carriage so brightly lit that you struggle to see a world you know is there, beyond the pane of glass… read more


13 Apr 2O18

Bone Ovation
by Caroline Hardaker


Bone Ovation is the debut poetry pamphlet from Caroline Hardaker. It is a slim collection of 20 poems, published by Valley Press, that satisfies an interest in myth and folklore. Hardaker’s poetry is an example of mythology as a splitting open of the present, of stories and a deep-seated connection to the past. It considers an element common to all, ‘Composite of brittle chalk and precious like the stalks of daisies in chains.’ Bone… read more


3 Oct 2O17

Paul Hawkins’
Diisonance book launch


On Friday 8 September, a curious group of people met at The Gallery Café in Bethnal Green for the launch of Diisonance – a book of protest texts, art and collaborative experimental poetry… read more


29 Sep 2O17

Crump Redivivus 
by Neil Godsell


Neil Godsell’s debut novel Crump Redivivus, published by The Voidery Aperture in 2016, is a work of contemporary fiction that experiments with language and literary form. The novel is described by its publisher as ‘a stark exploration of a life given over to the observation of other, equally unsatisfactory lives’… read more
Mark

Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden


Darker With the Lights On is a collection of 20 short stories by David Hayden, a prolific writer of short fiction, published by Little Island Press.

The mind is a slope and the words run off like water and who knows where they go? (From ‘Memory House’).

With an abundance of imagination through surreal and unbounded worlds beyond and beneath the world we inhabit, Darker With the Lights On is like taking a train in the dark, the carriage so brightly lit that you struggle to see a world that you know is there beyond the pane of glass. You cup your hands around your eyes and press your nose against the window, trying to see into the darkness, only to be confronted by your own reflection. You cannot see past the ghost of yourself. If only they’d turn the lights off, so you might see clearly the world outside. It is this strange juxtaposition of sense, sensation and rationalising that Hayden captures so brilliantly in this collection.

The dark was outside, thick and blue, while in the dining room light glinted off silk and silver becoming general glitter that, if seen from the night, would have signified a happy party. (From ‘The Bread that was Broken’)

Hayden inhabits nowhere places and nothings as intrinsic parts of life. He asks what it means to call somewhere a place and what it means, in fact, to say or do anything at all.

The train travelled through quiet places with unused piles of gravel, abandoned cars, hard patch farms […] Michael paid close attention to the gradual aggregation of the city, trying to discover the point at which nowhere became somewhere. (From ‘Last Call for the Hated’)

The stories are works of metafiction that assert the idea that the most radical, surreal, illusory imaginings can be brought to the page:

Words are just mute smudges until you know what they mean, and when you put them together they can tell all manner of things. There’s plenty you can’t say with words. You can fall through words down into a seething belly world of billions of objects and notions, all shrieking and hiding. (From ‘How to Read a Picture Book’)

Hayden constructs pockets of hyper-reality that are nonsensical and radiant: ‘When you die – when you die – you revive in the world of the last book you were reading before your… demise’ (from ‘Reading’). It is writing that reaches for the depths of our minds’ possibility. It asks: what can be imagined? Beyond sense, rationality, logic. On reading, I admit, I became confrontational, annoyed, indifferent, dozing off. How dare you, Hayden, try to test the limits of my mind! But I caught glimpses, symbolic moments of meaning, which pulled me in, and continue to do so. Mine was the response of a reader tired, rushed, distracted, shut off, but I fought the shadow of myself to find ways into the text that Hayden offers wholeheartedly.

I grow calmer and darker, waiting for the world to fall away not knowing whether it will fall up or down. (From ‘Memory House’)

Much lies dormant beneath the juddering page inflicted with Hayden’s prose, poised to ambush the reader with its brilliance. This is writing that it is a pleasure to write about – to think about with as much vigour as if it were your own. That is what it asks of you: to be curious, clenched and to grapple with consciousness in the act of reading.

Books let you circle around time, find the root of time, lose time, recover time. (From ‘How to Read a Picture Book’)

Often returning to the first line in the last, each story picks words out of themselves, repeating and filtering down its own language. Time is a curious factor throughout, how it passes and how it is experienced. Each story balances philosophical, psychological and physiological elements, and contributes to the balance of the collection as a whole. Not a balance serene and unwavering, but a struggling and unstable attempt at equilibrium that is inexplicably human.