On his twenty-ninth birthday, Baby Williams gave a party for two or three thousand in the New Orleans Superdome. Baby and his older brother Slim ran Cash Money, the hottest rap label in the city, and they liked to live large.
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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.
‘Across the river, in a Catholic enclave in the Waterside district, there was a disused funeral home in which, three nights a week, at 6d a shot, contraband teen movies could be sat through and sometimes seen, according to the state of the projector.’
‘I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind’.
‘In every other respect – colour, country, creed – these people might have nothing in common. Some were convicted criminals, others sought political asylum, still others had overstayed their visas or were accused of Green Card frauds, and a few might even be mistakes, the victims of computer or human error. But this one bond was absolute.’
The authors discuss music, the internet’s gamified reading culture and reading your reviews.
‘I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful.’
On training to be an opera singer.
