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‘Flamingo’ by Kathryn Bevis shortlisted for Saboteur Awards

Left: . Right the cover of her book Flamingo

Seren poet Kathryn Bevis’s debut pamphlet Flamingo is on the shortlist for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. 

The Saboteur Awards are audience led, with nominations for each category made by the general public. Flamingo is one of 5 collections on the shortlist for Best Pamphlet. 

  • Devjani Bodepudi, For the Daughters Carried Here on the Hips of Their Mothers
  • Hannah Linden, The Beautiful Open Sky
  • Katheryn Bevis, Flamingo
  • Nikki Dudley, Exorcism Becomes Habit
  • Sallyanne Rock, Salt and Metal

Voting is now open for the second round of nominations where the public can vote for the winner in each category. Votes can be cast via this google form https://forms.gle/r7jyoNvNpzJXYH7K7.

The Saboteur Awards Festival will take place on Saturday 24th June in Birmingham. You can book tickets via their website. 

Other award categories include: Best Short Story Collection, Best Spoken Word Performer, Best Magazine, Best Literary Festival, Best Novella, Best Poetry Pamphlet, Best Regular Spoken Word Night, Best Spoken Word Show, Most Innovative Publisher, Best Reviewer of Literature, Best Collaborative Work and Best Anthology. Find out more about the awards on Sabotage Reviews.

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Friday Poem – ‘The way you knew’ by Alison Binney

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The way you knew’ by Alison Binney from her Mslexia award-winning pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a kitchen with the faint shadows of people moving through it. The text reads: Other Women's Kitchens. Alison Binney.

Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a poet who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading.

The way you knew the way you knew your own coat in the cloakroom the way you knew as you chewed how big the next bubble would be the way everyone knew the new boy was weird even before he began drinking ink the way you knew how to share crisps and when to and why it mattered the way your bike always knew the way home the way you knew when to laugh and how much and who with the way you knew not to sit at the front the way you knew when to put your hand up and why no one did any more the way you knew not to wear shoes like that the way you knew what behind the bike sheds meant before anyone said the way everyone knew who went the way you knew the name carved on the desk wasn’t yours but the izza lezza made you go red the way you knew not to wear your hair short the way you knew how to walk how to talk how to french kiss a boy and why you had to and more the way you knew for sure that if anyone knew about you you were dead

Other Women’s Kitchens is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

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Friday Poem – ‘[ correspondence : another year ]’ by Sammy Weaver

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ correspondence : another year ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition.

This cover shows a geometric image of think white lines against black stripes. A gaping white hole is cut from the middle. The text reads: Angola, America. Sammy Weaver.

Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.

[ correspondence : another year ] the grey static of the dashboard ignites into a ringtone ignites into a w oman’s voice pale-polite as a white picket fence in the still of morning: hello, this is a free call from ______ an incarcerated individual at louisiana state penitentiary, this call is not pr ivate & may be monitored, you may start the conversation now & the line ignites into song as you sing to me happy birthday & because birth is death in reverse i imag ine blowing a candle out backwards, sucking the orange talons into the prison of my lungs, the w ax congealing up the wick, the match lying down in its box, the rush of our bodies diminishing inside the bodies of our mothers

Angola, America is available on the Seren website: £6.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Join us online from 7:30pm on Thursday 2nd February to hear Sammy Weaver reading from Angola, America alongside Kathryn Bevis at Seren Virtual First Thursday. Tickets are £2 (plus Eventbrite admin fee).

Book now
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Friday Poem – ‘Flamingo’ by Kathryn Bevis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Flamingo’ by Kathryn Bevis from her pamphlet of the same name. If you missed the online launch for Flamingo, you can watch it back now on our Youtube channel.

This cover shows a surreal still life painting of four flamingos poking their heads out of a blue and white patterned vase. The text reads: Flamingo, Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn Bevis’s critically-acclaimed debut pamphlet Flamingo introduces us to a troupe of wild, unique, and captivating poems. Life and our own embodiment are brought sharply into focus as we encounter a variety of subjects including work, survival, love, and mortality. Formally inventive, these hopeful and sometimes surreal poems are not afraid to confront complex or difficult emotions. Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferer’s body, and the title poem imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife. Each poem is a discovery and a joy.

Flamingo My love, when I die, I’ll turn flamingo: fall asleep, face tucked in on the pillow of myself. Even as you cry, I’ll be stepping from the bed, feeling plush, pink tulle tutuing from my hips. My legs will telescope, grow thin and rosy. I’ll sense my feet web, feel a new itch to stamp and stir, to suck up larvae from the bottom of the lagoon. In this afterworld, some days I’ll fix one foot in mud, find infinite repose: the poise of a yogi in prayer. Others, I’ll gorge myself, filter feed on brine shrimp from the salty shadows. The other birds and I will grunt and growl over the choicest cuts like church women bickering over rosettes for jam at a country show. My love, do you know that the dead all flock together? We meet at the saline lake, dance our shuffle-legged shimmy, flick our heads like tango partners, flag and flap our scarlet scalloped wings, heads bopping, nodding to the beat. Do you see? After the illness, after the grief, the pain — as you will do, sweetheart — the dead must learn to love again.

Flamingo is available on the Seren website for £6.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Watch the recording of the online launch for Flamingo back on our Youtube channel now. Kathryn is joined by guest readers Vicky Morris and Jonathan Edwards.

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Friday Poem – ‘White Poem’ by SL Grange

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘White Poem’ by SL Grange from their pamphlet bodies and other haunted houses which won the inaugural Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. The Poetry Wales Wales Poetry Award is currently open for entries for single poems until the 12th January 2023.

This cover shows a black and white photo of the top of someones arm. they are pulling pack their t-shirt sleeve to reveal a ribbon tattoo which reads bodies and other haunted houses.

Speaking from and for LGBTQIA+ communities, SL Grange gives a voice to lost transcestors, celebrates acts of resistance, sings a gender-fluid love song, and hosts a tender-angry conversation with the ghosts of the personal and political histories that inhabit us. In true haunted house tradition, the non-human and the supernatural are also given rooms of their own; personal demons are summoned, we are entangled with our wilder sides. Witchcraft, seance and prophecy are invoked and brought up against sharp slices of reality. Described by judges as ‘strong and self-assured’, ‘sheer gorgeous’, and ‘a dark and brooding collection that combines the visceral nature of the body with the ephemeral and supernatural’, bodies, and other haunted houses is a beautifully crafted exploration of identity which queers time as well as self.

White poem This is a poem that throws everything else to the dogs This is a poem that buys tinned tuna Coffee Green beans out of season And finds the excess to be lyrical Full of portent This poem only cares about Walking varnished nails Across skin like cream And looks out of the window Tear ducts moistening To see a Pepper’s ghost of itself Staring back, deeply moved This poem has found The One And dances with them Under filament lightbulbs One hand upon their lover’s shoulder The other on their lover’s neck Starting to squeeze

bodies and other haunted houses is available from on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Don’t forget to browse the Seren Christmas Gift Guide 2022 for last-minute gift inspiration.

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Friday Poem – ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘[ search ]’ by Sammy Weaver from her pamphlet Angola, America which won this year’s Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize.

This cover shows a geometric image of think white lines against black stripes. A gaping white hole is cut from the middle. The text reads: Angola, America. Sammy Weaver.

Angola, America, winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021, takes its name from a prison in Louisiana in the southern United Sates. In these strikingly original, thoroughly contemporary, and deeply moving poems, we are immersed in the world the inmates must endure. From the first poem, when we witness a home-made tattoo and understand that this scarring and incision is a “map in the connective tissue of pain and loss”, we are drawn into this world in a way that is carefully observed and beautifully empathetic.

[ search ] In the beginning the guard’s gloved hands pat you down, searching for weapons, his touch is weaponized, the muted duty of his movements smooth along each of your arms. Soon the guard’s touch is the only touch from another and you think of your mother after bath time, the harbour of her chest against yours, the rough-love of her towelling you dry, reaching into all the nooks and crannies, no cabbages behind the ears she says. And yes, I guess searching the body is another way of saying the body is a trove of treasure and your touch a torch.

Angola, America is available on the Seren website: £6.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Read Sammy’s poem ‘[ exhibit : electric chair ]’ and a comment about ‘How she did it’ on the Mslexia website.

The Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2022 is now open for entries. Find out more here.

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Friday Poem – ‘On Wonder Woman’s Island’ by Alison Binney

This week our Friday Poem is ‘On Wonder Woman’s Island’ by Alison Binney from her debut pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens which is the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet competition 2020.

This cover shows a colourful painting of a kitchen with the fain shadows of people moving through it.

Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a gifted new voice who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading. Seren is thrilled to be presenting this author’s first collected work.

On Wonder Woman's Island the women are all leather and deltoids, sword fights and whirling hair. They call 'you are stronger than your know,' reaching out sinewy forearms to lift each other up off the sand. Any time you can yell 'Shield!' just for the hell of it and a girl will kneel, shield angled over thigh, while another runs up, springs, fires an arrow mid-leap, lands on a silver horse. At night there's a cave with an underground waterfall jacuzzi and a nook in the wall thick with fur. And if the men come, lugging guns up the beach, you sleep on, cat-like: seeing only sheer cliffs and bare rock they will soon turn tail, their flag not worth the planting here, and the breeze long gone.

Other Women’s Kitchens is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

The Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition is now open for entries for 2021. Find out more on the Mslexia website.

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Friday Poem – ‘Weaving with Rushes’ by Sarah Wimbush

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Weaving with Rushes’ by Sarah Wimbush from her debut pamphlet Bloodlines which has just been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2020.

Bloodlines is an exploration of Sarah Wimbush’s own Gypsy/Traveller heritage, a journey made by piecing together fragments of distant stories and a scattered language. Along the way, we meet people who are ‘tethered to the seasons’; voices that reverberate with a sense of family and resilience, and always with that constant wonder of being part of something colourful, untamed and rare.

“A thrilling debut…” – Daljit Nagra

Bloodlines is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Enjoy this filmpoem of Sarah reading the pamphlet’s title poem ‘Bloodlines’. Film made by Isobel Turner.

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Friday Poem – ‘The Calling Basket’ by Sarah Wimbush

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Calling Basket’ by Sarah Wimbush from her pamphlet Bloodlines which won the Mslexia/ PBS Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2019.

Bloodlines is an exploration of Sarah Wimbush’s own Gypsy/Traveller heritage, a journey made by piecing together fragments of distant stories and a scattered language. Along the way, we meet people who are ‘tethered to the seasons’; voices that reverberate with a sense of family and resilience, and always with that constant wonder of being part of something colourful, untamed and rare.

“A thrilling debut…” – Daljit Nagra

Bloodlines is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

The Mslexia Women’s Poetry Prizes are currently open for entries for 2020. Find out more on their website. 

Sarah will be joining us for our Virtual First Thursday National Poetry Day Special next week (1 October) where she will be reading alongside Rhian Edwards and Marvin Thompson. Tickets are available at www.eventbrite.co.uk. 

‘Late Afternoon by a Hedge’ by Sarah Wimbush, from Bloodlines