As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it. It was a small lift, just a box on a rope really. You could hear the churning of the wheel high above, and the whole thing creaked as it wound you up through the building.
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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.
‘The year I'm talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen’.
‘After a series of seizures in my temporal lobe, I started to forget words and say sentences backwards.’
Missouri Williams on the drive to circle back.
‘You don’t understand. The country where I used to live is now gone.’
Ntsika Kota is the winner of the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa.
‘A few years ago, while in between jobs, I started doing astrology readings for cash.’
Anna Dorn on her astrology journey.
‘These are the stories and concerns of everyday people at the height of a time of great change, and perhaps the best work by one of Chicago's best-known sons.’
