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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

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. The collection is published by Ampersand, a newly established independent literary publisher who print their own books out of North London. The edition is beautiful, made with care and attention to its contents. The decadent decay of flora on the cover reflects decaying ideals of beauty and femininity that the poems present: they offer something brave and honest.

The collection opens with the title poem, ‘Recipe for Being a Woman.’ It is a prose poem that is pithy in both senses of the word, substantial and fruitful like the pulp of an emollient peach: ‘Her skin should be clear and peachy, her features should be elegant and refined’. Cameron treats femininity with uncanny, at times potentially abject, consideration: ‘Measure the organs, skin, form and facial features into a bowl and stir together to form a dough. The dough should be firm yet pliable, once she is fully baked’. The result is a manual of tongue-in-cheek aphorisms that elbow-nudge ideas of ready-made gender moulds: ‘Fold the dough in half and knead it, making sure that all the beauty is contained. Beauty is a woman’s most powerful asset and must, under no circumstances, be wasted’. The language is formal and antiquated, a pastiche of a domestic cookery recipe, which are, in terms of syntax, instructive and imperative. A woman should be edible. The ideal of beauty is upheld by a multibillion pound industry that depends on that image. Women consume industry in order to be consumed and consumable themselves. The poet’s irony insists that, rather than being told how to be women, we be let alone to figure out how to be own separate selves.

Cameron is playful with poetic form. ‘ID’, for example, is a concrete poem dealing with Freudian psychoanalysis. It seems to put neuroses on the page, wherein the lines that make up the poem warp and scatter in a cerebral formation. The poem looks like a brain and may visualise chatter in the skull that we endure and struggle to silence: ‘all I have and all I ever really had / is something I can’t hold in my hands’. It is difficult to read the lines in any coherent order which is representative of a chaotic mind.

Cameron is playful with language. Such as in ‘Clichés’, ‘gone are the days / When we’d sit praying for it to rain / Cats and dogs / Barking up all the wrong trees / in the hopes we would reach our dreams,’ she reissues passé habits of language to speak for a new generation in crisis. She shows that a modern or ‘millennial’ existence is far more troubling and complex than we imagine. These poems suggest, with a subtle spirit, that the future is in the hands of a youth who struggle and strive, being born into an accelerating world:

We never run from the spider
That lures us
Into the World Wide Web
Come let’s see the sites he says
This world he weaves
Words we read
Emoticons over emotions

The collection is political, philosophical and psychological and, at the same time, accessible and relatable. Cameron handles issues of heartache, grief, and self-identification with humour and kindness; kindness in the sense of having things in-kind and an understanding of each other. Her poems are honest and generous with real gumption.