‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.
– Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876
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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.
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
‘When I was seventeen, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading.’
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
Will Self and Mark Doty's discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction.
‘The bushes grow dense across the top of the drop, but Martin can just see through the leaves: young mother and son, swimming in the pool hollowed out by the waterfall.’
