Prize-winning

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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 – ‘We are coming’ by Kim Moore

Earlier this week, Kim Moore was announced the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022. This week’s Friday Poem is ‘We are coming’ from her wining collection All The Men I Never Married. You can hear Kim chatting in-depth about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a collage of a male figure made up of tiny images of nature. The figure is surrounded by butterflies which stand out against the black background. The text reads All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore. Winner of the Forward Prize.

Pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire, All The Men I Never Married is Kim Moore’s award-winning and critically acclaimed second collection. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. She turns the spotlight on interactions between men and women, revealing easy misogyny, everyday sexism and uncomfortable truths about the challenges women face on a daily basis.

We are coming under cover of darkness, with our strawberry marks, our familiars, our third nipples, our ill-mannered bodies, our childhoods spent hobbled like horses where we were told to keep our legs closed, where we sat in the light of a window and posed and waited for the makers of the world to tell us again how a woman is made. We are arriving from the narrow places, from the spaces we were given, with our curses and our spells and our solitude, with our potions we swallow to shrink us small as insects or stretch us into giants, for yes, there are giants amongst us, we must warn you. There will be riots, we’re carrying all that we know about silence as we return from the forests and towers, unmaking ourselves, stepping from the pages of books, from the eye of the camera, from the cages we built for each other, the frames of paintings, from every place we were lost and afraid in. We stand at the base of our own spines and watch tree turn to bone and climb each vertebra to crawl back into our minds, we’ve been out of our minds all this time, our bodies saying no, we were not born for this, dragging the snare and the wire behind us.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Listen to our in-depth interview with Kim about All The Men I Never Married in episode 9 which is available now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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

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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 – ‘Unseen Island’ by Christine Evans

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Unseen Island’ by Christine Evans from our new anthology A Last Respect.

The cover of A Last Respect shows a painting of rolling green fields beneath a blue sky. In the distance, a lake is visible at the bottom of the valley.

A Last Respect is a selection of contemporary Welsh poetry by winners of the Roland Mathias Prize. The poems included are wide ranging in style and subject. They contemplate relationships, nature, the environment, mortality, time, art and politics, and take place in a range of locations, from Aberystwyth to Baghdad, from war-torn landscapes to parents’ evenings. Two accompanying essays provide the context in which the poets work. In her Introduction, Jane Aaron writes about Roland Mathias: a poet himself, but also an influential editor and cultural commentator who did much to foster and develop poetry in Wales. A Last Respect is a continuation of his legacy. Daniel G. Williams’ Afterword is an incisive discussion about poetry in Wales over the past sixty years: where it started from and how it changed. A must-have anthology of poetry from Wales.

Featuring Dannie Abse, Tiffany Atkinson, Ruth Bidgood, Ailbhe Darcy, Rhian Edwards, Christine Evans, John Freeman, Philip Gross, Gwyneth Lewis, Robert Minhinnick, and Owen Sheers.

Unseen Island. From accross the sleeping Sound the unseen island nudges at my consciousness – wind-blown Enlli; nowhere more steeped in calm, more resonant of growing. There, air trembles with associations and I am played to a tune I scarcely recognise easy as water, but earthed. Is it energy or faith that breeds content in me? Washed smooth, drawn out, moulded to acceptance like clay on a wheel, so like a compass I am pointing always where you lie – elusive, shimmering – but no mirage: my unblurring.

A Last Respect is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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

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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