It’s often such a secret ingredient that accounts for a poem’s electric effect, that static we sense on the page when we read it, or even before we read it. In the theoretical explorations of Julia Kristeva, the power of art is said to arise from the unconscious response to the “abject” on the frontier where desire is confronted with horror and disgust. Meaning emerges in a borderland “where identities… do not exist or only barely so – double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” Maybe so. At any rate, I’d say the pleasure of poems includes a sense of freedom that often involves broaching the illicit, as when those ‘anonymous’ Pashtun women exchange couplets in the huddle of menial labour.

from Maurice Riordan’s editorial

The Poetry Review podcast

Poems

Michael Longley, The Barnacle Geese, Fifty Years, The Nosegay
Julia Copus, Sunday Morning at Oscar’s
James Giddings, The Last of the Handshakers, There is a Part at the End of the Film, A Small Windswept Town
Tim Liardet, Cop Convo, Subtitles Only    
Helen Mort, Ablation  
Mike Barlow, Ill Wind    
Jemma Borg, Quickening    
Jodie Hollander, He’s    
Ruby Robinson, Apology    
Phillis Levin, Boy with a Book Bag    
Simon Richey, The Emptiness, Still Life with Words
Greg Delanty, The Hellboxer, [Untitled]
Julian Stannard, Emigrés, Hermes
Carol Rumens, Glosa on ‘Woman of Spring’ by Joan Margarit, Finger Marks
      …and read Carol Rumens’s Behind the poem online feature
Harry Clifton, Pity and Terror    
Katrina Naomi, Maybe Owls, Taking Off Billy Collins’s Clothes
Julian Turner, The Black Box    
Billy Ramsell, The Top 10 Luminous Mushrooms of Cerdanya Forest

Prose

Poets reading: Julian Stannard on Frederick Seidel, Sarah Howe on Peter Streckfus, and Mark Waldron on Jeff Hilson
Sophie Collins on I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan    
Poetry Prizes: an update        
Sara Peters’s Letter from Canada  

Gallery

Seamus Murphy’s Afghan photos    

Reviews

Jamie McKendrick on Enzensberger’s New Selected Poems
Carol Rumens on Greta Stoddart and Matthew Siegel    
William Wootten on Jack Underwood and Sarah Howe    
Eamon Grennan on Christopher Reid and Caitríona O’Reilly    
Conor O’Callaghan on Mark Doty and Tom Sleigh    
Julia Bird on Mona Arshi, Andrew McMillan and Kim Moore
Fiona Moore on Annie Freud and Sheri Benning    
David Wheatley on Steve Ely, Tom Pow and Peter Riley    
Gregory Leadbetter on John McAuliffe and Kate Bingham
Patrick Crotty on Paul Durcan, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Peter Sirr