It is a slightly strange experience to read Julia’s poems because I am, in a sense, also the author of them. (You are the author of them, not because you are the author of the source text, but because you helped me rewrite the source text into these poems.) Many of the poems in this collection rewrite or re-appropriate the text of my debut novel, Lost Boys. I wrote Lost Boys between 2003-2006, and the novel was published by Little, Brown in 2008. The novel was written, in part, as a response to the events of the Iraq war and as a way to explore and critique certain forms of privileged male alienation – but it was also an overt rewriting of Barrie’s Peter Pan that incorporates (or pays homage to) elements from JG Ballard’s novella ‘Running Wild’ and ‘Wild Boys’ by William Burroughs....
Issue 10
An Irregular Magazine More about Junction Box
To offer an overview of rem press it seems important to begin with an account of the design principles behind the press. To a large degree they reflected what was going on in the books. While creating a simple and inexpensive way to make the books was one factor in the design, when we devised it we also actively wanted the resistance of the black covers. It was impenetrable and gave nothing away. It was a symbol of the poetry that could seem, at first glance, on the surface, so ungiving. This was balanced against the bright colours of the title and end pages - writers chose a colour for their book, revealed, of course as you opened the book but also visible as a thin line of cover viewed side on. The minimalist covers were blank except for the small embossed name of the press going up the...
Ritual: I thinking about ritual : : the ritual of thinking confusing ritual with ritualistic inside noise is a space where I am the bodiment of resistance to ritual (understood as mindless devotion to a set of gestures embedded in stone) embodiment : : impediment the embediment of noise when extracted from the habitat also known as natural the dénouement is also natural : a denouncement of gesture congealed by mindlessness into an unthinking thing devoid of beauty embedded in noise but when the gesture vanishes from lack of use (or overuse) what remains? a lack : the something missing thing that hovers at the edges of expectation just a few inches above the waiting toes expecting to be touched by brushing fingers the curve of back the swift dip of practised youth...
9/12/15“Through the gap in passers-by could see wall animals tugging at the leads, but painted in profile their thoughts were a mystery. 2 men talked. One said ‘once I realised a paradise wasn’t possible, the next I no longer cared.’ In his time had executed many of the cavalries on reality, he wanted everyone to know. Other held his hand, palm upward; an administrator. People closed over, with crooked arms” 16/12/15 “JAK faces both ways – to world outside + down into the block, quiet there this Xmas, waits for train travelling almost unimaginably fast, who transcript a tall, 2-faced man that swings upon a handle.. ?life, or continued journey on the train, back to surface of the cell, making new peace + war. To high transitional...
from Howled at the Moon Felt Good with two lines by Adrienne Rich When the lake in the morning renders belief that the water moves in one direction only, that you know better than the current or the wet life mass below, and then, the next day, there it goes away, confounding habit. The altar of firs, the just-paved dirt road, the eagle’s nest and the feeder creek have always been a poem to you, a blood-warm mantra, a way to talk to yourself. Now, the deer is born scarlet- ... TO READ BOTH POEMS, CLICK HERE: Two poems by Laura Goode Laura Goode is the author of a novel for young adults, Sister Mischief (Candlewick Press, 2011) and a collection of poems, Become a Name (Fathom Books, 2016). Subscribe to her monthly newsletter, Ovaries and Bovaries:...
The Link Between Player Relationships and Interactivity in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMOs) is a genre of gaming that cannot be grouped with others despite sharing common traits with single player console games. MMOs feature first-person shooters (FPS) as well as the more traditional open-world and fantasy-based universes. The motivations that guide players to MMOs can be found by distilling motivations discussed by Kristen Lucas and John Sherry describing six traits found in players of any kind of video game: competition, challenge, social interaction, diversion, fantasy, and arousal.1 One trait for which MMOs are especially known is social interaction through public spaces found in-game which attract those looking to socialise...
Trailing arm leading edge A12 flyover traffic: Redbridge circles it, warily; wagon-train of taxis; container trucks grind to bright blue scaffolding; CAUTION flyover concrete waterproofing in progress; shoot miles and miles of wire fencing Leyton two miles (61 mins) a mini-digger humps the bank, hymn books flip-flap into the subway (closed). Builders w/hoods-up and security talk-up, walk in time to road-gospel-psalms; a future Premier Inn tower as 50k speaker stack TO READ THE WHOLE OF THIS PIECE, CLICK HERE: Trailing arm leading edge Paul Hawkins is a poet, text artist & collaborator sometimes known as bob modem &/or haul pawkins. He has an ongoing experimental collaboration with Portugese text artist/poet bruno neiva under the guise...
Categorically, a cavity is a cave the moment it might admit a human body and when I learned that this was the measure of it, I knew I knew poems by the relief my full body makes for itself in finding the poem. If all you can do is press a knuckle to the depression in the ground or watch as the water — like a gif of water tripping into loops of distance — trips, you’re looking into a hole or a hollow or a swallet or a pocket (or prose, even). You need to be able to pull the full wet ten degrees around you like a sleeping bag, at least and right up to your neck, for a cave to be a cave. Once you’re snug, you can begin the ecstatic business, echoing your hello-lo-lo-belownesses all night long if you must. But if, say, the cave admits nothing to no body, not even you, and lies on its...
Like every other love letter since the dawn of etc it is not at all important but I think you should know that I do not type well and in fact for example only today I noticed a once-important page now incorrectly bears the title List of Famous People Who Owed Chow Dogs and it is not crucial but perhaps you would like to learn that Freud’s favourite chow ate one of its own puppies and Michael Field—florid poet, quantum aunt—held a wake for theirs on a dais with a garland made of iris-crowns while photographs of Georgia O’Keefe’s pair show them scuffling and staring at pebbles through a studio window o keefe o keefe the sound of paws in the mistaken dust and through my window the air is still and still it is air despite all the dogs and what they are owed and although...
1. Because I live in New England and it is always drafty here, even in summer, even indoors, especially at night. These houses so often have both basements and attics, so much cold air entering and escaping. 2. I find photos of my friend Steph where I shouldn’t and always at the right time: in the trunk of my car after a break up; in an old folder containing tax documents; the only item out of place in my locked apartment after I’ve been gone all day. 3. Because sometimes there is no rational explanation. 4. In Ecuador, a group of students calls me late at night from a house across the village. Stalks of corn tower over both sides of the road, which is marked by their long, jagged shadows. The woman who owns the house lets me in. The calendar on her wall is three years passed. “They...
26. Supposing Supposing. Just supposing. Suppose that arts admin actually Shakespeared itself and only then found reason for losing a phony war by posing as Government for all. One reason given, I’d suppose, is that authoritarianism is a separate issue for a stray wagon forced to hide in the forest with no wheelwright for 500 miles. No, maybe I’m not practical, but that doesn’t mean I’m impractical or without further ado - e.g. Jack Bruce’s Theme for an Imaginary Western invited yeasty thematics. Back in the day I wrote a long stringy poem with smudgy turquoise ink called For Pete Brown. I don’t remember any of it but it was sensational and oozed the spirit of love hearts, sherbetty but literate. Some lines were jagged and nervous while others were cushions on garden furniture...
Same River Twice The crust on its uppers. Can there be a lower crust? Something ‘withers beneath the encrusted totality.’ Loaf used wouldn’t spend time carving love hearts on bark or engraving symbolic rings in the ice like some little Stevie transported to Tunturia. The ring seems a more significant figure than the heart since the heart gets anthropomorphized rotten hoping it might see its double in the floodwater lying repressed under the ice rind. Arctic roll. Arctic circle. It’a all about what’s beneath the surface. The ring is broken - a hermeneutic circle that cannot be completed. Can’t pull wool over eyes, cockled heart can’t be warmed. While the dominant metaphor of heat underlying the cold to restless fluids welling beneath a hardened apparently unyielding...
