OXFORD REVIEW 
of BOOKS

MARIA SLEDMERE - 'Romance scams always make me cry / my front teeth chipped from the cinnamon cookie'

By Donna Stonecipher People were getting rid of their libraries, and they sighed with relief when they spoke of it, as though the weight...

PATRICK ROMERO McCAFFERTY - 'Over every coast a yellow parasail registers the weighty flit / of a stingray the size of Scotland'.

KATIE KIRKPATRICK - 'three warm bodies in a fridge, / feathers stretching out into the corridor, / not apologising for taking up space.'

JED MUNSON - 'The caveat is essential: the delusion is sincere. // I’m entitled to my obscurity / and this megaphone as an American'

ANDREW WYNN OWEN - 'I found that I had clambered a steep mountain. / Up there I saw a shelter / with crenellations and a fountain.'

GEOFFREY NUTTER - 'What can I tell you about Sister Cities? / You are not one, but a succession of identities, / like them.'

ELENA KARINA BYRNE - 'Suppose, pulling yourself apart, you didn't come / in one piece, / and like language, had to be put back together'

PHILIP HANCOCK - 'An assortment of sticks / sprouts from a five litre tin / on the work bench.'

KATE McLOUGHLIN - 'At midnight, at the border, the train, / Which had roared through birch forests, / Stopped.'

MAYA C POPA - 'The clipper without / sail or shroud, // a shell through which / the city gleamed'

HEIDI WILLIAMSON - 'Unexpectedly there were complications. / Expectedly the doctors said to abort.'

ANDREW MCNEILLIE - 'I remember how the Foster brothers / trained their birds in stages'

MAGGIE WANG - 'they used to call this town hell made of ice / their lips would tremble'

FASASI ABDULROSHEED OLADIPUPO - 'The narration said it is Shaytān trying to take us back into its darkness.'

NATALIE PERMAN - 'I pulled the moth of a memory away from the lampshade / with a toothpick'

PAUL STEPHENSON - 'the truth/crumbled into the blue linoleum of the hangar-like studio'

JEN FRANTZ - You are the pilot of your own sanity.

HELENA AEBERLI – 'I want to unpeel the universe / with my fingernails / and dig out the planets'

SALAWU OLAJIDE – 'At the back of the yellow container is the makeshift reception...'