Shelter County, West Virginia. Late July 1963.


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‘No one was safe walking to church in the dark, but Buddy knew better than to beg not to go'.
Shelter County, West Virginia. Late July 1963.
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‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
An elegy by Nick Laird for his father, Alastair Laird, who died in 2021 of Covid-19. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
From Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia, published by Granta Books and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
‘My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us.’
A poem by Kaveh Akbar, from his shortlisted collection Pilgrim Bell, first published in Granta 156: Interiors.
‘I wanted to and then / Remembered why I want to never’
Poetry by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for Cain Named the Animal.
‘Would / the apple be concerned / if I said it was not an apple’
Poems by Padraig Regan, from Some Integrity, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two short-story collections, Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, and four novels, Machine Dreams, Shelter, Termites and MotherKind, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2001. She directs the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. ‘Solly and Lark’, which appeared in Granta 100, is taken from her novel Termite.
More about the author →‘It's like by the time he was born there was too much to know.’
‘After the birth and the overnight in the hospital she didn’t go downstairs for a week.’
‘The sky burned white to blond to powder to an almighty blue; the sun fell unobstructed.’
‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’
‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’
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