The Headless Woman
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Drama Lessons for Young Girls
Tara Bergin
‘So the young girls, / cast as naughty young girls from the Acropolis, / left – / just with some things missing.’
My Last Day at Seventeen: Portraits from Russell Heights
Doug DuBois
Doug DuBois captures life at Russell Heights, a housing estate ‘of uncertain vintage that sits on Spy Hill above Cork harbour’.
The Visitor
Colin Barrett
‘The dog was some sort of overbred weedling with a ribcage fine-boned as a chicken’s, a wizened rat’s face and a goony, perpetually bloodshot stare that made Dev Hendrick want to punt the thing over the garden gate.’
Green, Mud, Gold
Sara Baume
‘She shuts her eyes and pictures ears growing out through her ears, her spine turning to wood, pictures herself as a girl-woman scarecrow, arms opened wide, and nailed to two posts in the centre of a great green, mud and gold expanse, crucified.’
The Birds of June
John Connell
‘Her dreams were interrupted occasionally by the sound of the cow and her newborn calf from the outhouse sheds. A low bellow would crinkle the folds of her mind and then seconds later it would be answered from some other shed in the distance.’
All We Shall Know
Donal Ryan
‘Thoughts sharpen themselves on the flints of one another and pierce me like a knife in my middle, sunk deep and twisted around.’
The Travellers
Birte Kaufmann
Birte Kaufmann examines the everyday, parallel world of Irish travellers.
A Visit to the Zoo
Colm Tóibín
‘The two chameleons in a glass case appeared to interest all of them, Heinrich thought, because of their beauty and their stillness. They looked like a pale painting.’
The Wonder
Emma Donoghue
‘Lib didn’t like to bang harder in case of disturbing the family. Brightness leaked from the door of the byre, off to her right. Ah, the women had to be milking. A trail of melody; was one of them singing to the cows?’
The Mountain Road
William Wall
‘Funeral homes are always cold. There were pine benches in lines like a church. They had been varnished recently and there was that heady smell. It reminded me of my father’s boat, the wheelhouse brightwork newly touched up. It was the smell of childhood.’
Through the Night
Siobhán Mannion
‘The person in the mirror watches her, slightly swollen, slightly blurred.’
Our Day Will Come: Loyalist, Republican
Stephen Dock
Stephen Dock explores a divided Belfast and reflects on the economic hardship that affects both side.
Kiddio at the Wedding
Mary O’Donoghue
‘If he fell in I would jump straight after, I would plumb through water not cold so much as oily, and dark as a dirty wine bottle.’
The Butcher
Stephen Sexton
‘Outside deer are nowhere to be seen and inside / the radio spectrum fills up with sorrowful little packets of data.’
The Mask of Night
Lorna Gibb
‘I puzzled over the language but disentangled its meaning slowly, carefully, eager to connect’ Lorna Gibb on Shakespeare’s Juliet.
Hell and Night
Noelle Kocot-Tomblin
‘The implication of Iago’s silence is that there is no hope for his redemption’ Noelle Kocot-Tomblin on ‘Othello’.
On Sonnet 50
Paula Bohince
‘I love Shakespeare’s slow insistence, which mirrors the action within the poem: there is nothing but grief to reach.’ Paula Bohince on Shakespeare’s sonnet 50.
Sonnet 3
Rae Armantrout
‘Your dad told me to tell you / how good you look to him right now.’ Rae Armantrout revisits Shakespeare’s sonnet 3.
To Thine Own Self Be True
David Flusfeder
‘If Shakespeare’s characters stand for anything, it’s for a slipperiness of identity.’ David Flusfeder on a dog named Shakespeare.
On Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer
Sandra Simonds
‘I gently propose that for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death we stop reading Shakespeare and shift our attention to the poems of Aemilia Lanyer’. Sandra Simonds on Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer.
Ariel’s Song
Romesh Gunesekera
‘It is to Shakespeare’s pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.’
The Beacon & The Bane
Malerie Willens
‘In spite of my pining and missing, neither man seemed fully formed and I felt a little lonely in the presence of both.’
Fugee
Hawa Jande Golakai
‘Now we’ve fizzled into a ridiculous unsaid, a flaccid tale of love, or lack thereof, in the time of Ebola.’
Two Poems
Sandra Simonds
‘Police brutality makes me want to starve / myself to death and loneliness / is a drag’
Icons
Cortis & Sonderegger
Cortis & Sonderegger make the premise that there is truth left in photography more doubtful than ever before.
Five Things Right Now: Katy Simpson Smith
Katy Simpson Smith
Katy Simpson Smith shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Torn Silk and Garlands of Garlic
Teffi
Teffi remembers the Armenian refugees in Novorossiisk during the Russian Revolution.
Lucia Series
Jesse Ball
‘People love to say it to you like it counts: Oh, Lucia, she will live on in your memory.’
Civilization Spurns the Leopard
Solmaz Sharif
‘To step out of my door and hope to see something like a life, something passably me.’
