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‘I live on the border, between two states. I've lived here all my life, just about, and I know this place like the back of my hand’.
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Simon Armitage was born in Huddersfield in 1963. His collections of poetry include Kid (1992), The Dead Sea Poems (1995), and CloudCuckooLand (1997). His Selected Poems were published by Faber in 2001. Armitage is also the author of two novels and several collections of essays. He has received numerous awards, including The Sunday Times Author of the Year, a Forward Prize, a Lannan Award, and an Ivor Novello Award for his song lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings. Seeing Stars, his most recent collection, was published this year.
More about the author →‘The beasts of the forest drove me out. / The villagers barred their doors. / The gods turned the page.’
An unpublished letter by Ted Hughes, introduced by Simon Armitage. ‘It’s reassuring to see a spelling mistake (‘style’ for stile), and I love the maps.’
It’s too late now to start collecting football shirts,/bringing them back from trips abroad as souvenirs:
‘Why does serotonin make you happy? How does it affect mood? What is mood? What is depression? How does any of this stuff work?’
‘Some of the wisest things friends have said to me have been over text! But it’s a different kind of thinking.’
‘Last year father attacked me as a “wet radish”. This caused me to give up writing diary entries.’
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