Donut County
Sort by:
Disorientation
Ian Williams
‘The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting.’
Interview
Jay Bernard
An interview with the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.
Two Poems
sam sax
‘grief is an animal. we all know that. but which animal / exactly? what kingdom, what family, is it ever a fish?’
On Running
Larissa Pham
‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’
Best Book of 1891: The Birds of Manitoba
Sylvia Legris
‘During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.’
Best Book of 1978: Who Do You Think You Are?
Emily LaBarge
‘I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers’
Best Book of 1992: The English Patient
Stephanie Sy-Quia
‘I had been in England, a semi-foreign country, for a few months, and when I was asked where I was from, I had no easy answer.’
Best Book of 2019: Better Never Than Late
Ukamaka Olisakwe
‘This book is about how to navigate the thorny valley of dead dreams. Some will survive the ordeal; others will tip over the edge, irredeemable.’
Best Book of 1886: The Masterpiece
Summer Brennan
‘Zola’s characters are, in every sense of the term, art monsters.’
Best Book of 1959: Mrs Bridge
Sindya Bhanoo
‘When the book was published, my own parents were children in India, then a newly independent nation.’
Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger
Robert Chandler
Robert Chandler on why The Years of Anger by Randall Swingler is the best book of 1946.
Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821
Elvia Wilk
‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.
Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet
Daisy Lafarge
‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’
Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.
Best Book of 1924: The Beggar
Bill Manhire
‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’
Interview
Daisy Lafarge
‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.
A Bleed of Blue
Amy Key
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
The Want
Cyrus Simonoff
‘It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it.’
On Diane di Prima
Iris Cushing
‘Sex flowed into art, art flowed into livelihood, livelihood flowed into poetry, poetry flowed into friendship, friendship flowed into sex. The entirety of this life was sacred.’
The Lye of the Land
Derek Gow
‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’
In Conversation
Ruth Padel & Ilya Kaminsky
‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’
Ways of Knowing
Lauren Wallach
‘Maybe I was born with this face the way moths are born with the ability to blend in with bark, to survive.’
Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin
Robert Becker
‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’
Scapegoat
Katharine Quarmby
‘In 2000 the Disability Rights Commission was founded, to push for equal rights for disabled people. It had a major job on its hands, listening to and acting on individual cases – access, transport, discrimination – and getting the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act onto the statute book.’
Introduction
Isabella Tree
‘Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.’
Shifting Baselines
Callum Roberts
‘Younger generations accept as normal a world that seems tainted and degraded to older people.’
The Ard, the Ant and the Anthropocene
Charles Massy
‘I had somehow compartmentalised my mind: nature and my farm landscape stood either side of a deep chasm.’
Holding Up the Sky
Rod Mason & Charles Massy
‘Fire, wind, rain. We’re gonna meet all them three one day, all together, fire, wind and rain, all together one day very soon if we don’t do something about what’s happened and happening.’
