Mapping the Future reviewed in The Guardian & New Statesman
Karen McCarthy Woolf & Nathalie Teitler's anthology Mapping the Future reviewed in the New Statesman and in The Guardian; featured in Best poetry books of 2023 & as...
Launch event for Mapping the Future with Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf
The launch of Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets with editors Nathalie Teitler & Karen McCarthy Woolf, plus guest poets, is now on YouTube. Intro by...
I woke up in chains in the belly of the slave ship. The dip of the bow and the moan of the timbers made me fall asleep. When I woke again I was being whipped to get up. I passed out and when I woke I was on an auction block as men with ashy fingers checked my teeth. With a neck iron digging into my skin, I walked till I collapsed and when I woke the neck iron had become a noose which they pulled until I choked. I saw them looking at me, even little white kids pointing till it all went black. I woke up being sprayed to the floor with police hoses and dogs snapping at my shins. As the dog sank its teeth in my calf, a police hit me with his baton until I passed out. I woke up on the 16th floor of a tower block looking out the window with a clear view of the land that does not belong to me.
Roger Robinson
* Relativity for Stephen Hawking
When we wake up brushed by panic in the dark
our pupils grope for the shape of things we know.
Photons loosed from slits like greyhounds at the track
reveal light’s doubleness in their cast shadows
that stripe a dimmed lab’s wall – particles no more –
and with a wave bid all certainties goodbye.
For what’s sure in a universe that dopplers
away like a siren’s midnight cry? They say
a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train
will explain why time dilates like a perfect
afternoon; predicts black holes where parallel lines
will meet, whose stark horizon even starlight,
bent in its tracks, can’t resist. If we can think
this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?
Sarah Howe
*
A Latin American Sonnet
There is a palm tree somewhere, and a bird
of paradise that speaks to me in my dreams.
Well, not actually a bird, more like a blurred
vision of a plane crossing the endless seams
of a continent too big to fit here, in this isle
of gold where we plant elder for shade, sit
under a dusty sun, whatever it takes. Miles
away from everywhere, in my dreams a Brit
asks all the questions, and I often reply: who-
ever comes for tea will one day have to leave
for a better world. I end up kissing the beau
who is from here, or just about, so naive!
A blue parrot repeats my name in old English,
Leo, Leonardo. Perhaps it was a dream, well…ish.
Leo Boix
*
The Weight of the World
Oh, how they blew like vast sails in the breeze,
my mother’s wet sheets, pegged hard to the rope
of her washing line. There was always hope
of dry weather and no need for a please
or thanks between us as we hauled them down.
Whether to make the fold from right to left
or left to right, to tame the restless heft?
My job to know. I won’t call it a dance
but there were steps to learn and cues to read,
the give and take of fabric passed like batons
in a relay race. She was my due north.
Her right hand set west, mine tracing the east,
we closed the distance, calmed the wayward weight,
bringing order to the billowing world.
Seni Seneviratne
Contents List
9 Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo
12 Introduction by Nathalie Teitler
18 Preface by Karen McCarthy Woolf
ROUND 3
Raymond Antrobus
25 The Perseverance
27 Horror Scene as Black English Royal (Captioned)
Leo Boix
29 A Latin American Sonnet
29 A Latin American Sonnet III
30 Eucalyptus
Omikemi Natacha Bryan
32 Sirens
33 Home
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
35 Declaration
36 Pandemic vs. Black Folk
37 Dreaming is a Form of Knowledge Production
Will Harris
39 ‘In June, outrageous stood the flagons…’
40 The Seven Dreams of Richard Spencer
42 Scene Change
44 ‘Take the origin of banal…’
Ian Humphreys
47 The grasshopper warbler’s song
48 Swifts and the Awakening City
50 The wood warbler’s song
Momtaza Mehri
52 Fledglings
54 I AM BRINGING THE HISTORY OF THE KITCHEN SINK
INTO OUR BEDROOM AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME
55 Imperatives
Yomi Ṣode
57 Exhibition 2.0
59 12:05 in North London, Thinking about Kingsley Smith
60 An Ode to Bruv, Ting, Fam and, on Occasion, Cuz & My Man
Degna Stone
63 Walltown Crags
63 Proof of Life on Earth
65 over {prep., adv}
Jennifer Lee Tsai
67 About Chinese Women
71 The Yellow Woman
ROUND 2
Mona Arshi
75 Yellows
76 February
78 Arrivals
79 from My Little Sequence of Ugliness
80 from The Book of Hurts
Jay Bernard
82 Clearing
Kayo Chingonyi
86 Kumukanda
86 The Colour of James Brown’s Scream
87 Nyaminyami: ‘water can crash and water can flow’
88 Nyaminyami: epilogue
Rishi Dastidar
90 The Brexit Book of the Dead
91 Time takes a moment
92 Neptune’s concrete crash helmet
Edward Doegar
94 from The English Lyric I
94 from The English Lyric II
95 After After Remainder
Inua Ellams
97 from The Half God of Rainfall (Act One, Book I)
Sarah Howe
102 Sometimes I think
103 Relativity
104 from In the Chinese Ceramics Gallery
Adam Lowe
109 Gingerella’s Date
111 Elegy for the Latter-day Teen Wilderness Years
112 Reynardine for Red
Eileen Pun
115 Studio Apartment: Eyrie
116 Longways / Crosswise
Warsan Shire
120 Backwards
ROUND 1
Rowyda Amin
125 Genius Loci
125 We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire
