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Sophie McKeand and The Stories They Would Tell
Trees have rooted into our consciousness for as long as we have told stories. Their language holds the ground that is our past while stretching our minds up to the sky and future potential. Trees are our lungs; the words in our mouths; they are our confidants and friends. If the trees speak in myriad ways – is it us who have forgotten how to listen? After everything they’ve seen what would the trees tell us? In association with Bute Park and the Tree Charter, award-winning poet and Young People’s Laureate Wales, Sophie McKeand (Rebel Sun), will be on site...
Books Without Borders Bookclub read The Women Who Blow on Knots
The following guest post is provided by Claire Houguez, former Parthian staff, who attended the Books Without Borders Bookclub event in London. I take the lift up to the fifteenth floor of Saint Georges Hotel. It’s apt that we’re meeting here because, as is gleefully noted by organiser Philip, a hotel of the same name is referenced in The Women Who Blow on Knots, the book we’re here to discuss. Philip is already seated at the reserved table when I arrive and he greets me with fresh coffee. We marvel at the scenic cityscape through the large windows. Philip started...
New Welsh Review Blog: Better Houses by Susie Wild
'Better Houses is about the places we inhabit in life, about relationships and the extraordinary in the everyday. It has all the key subjects: birth, death, sex, love and loss. At the book’s core, it is as much about moving house as it is about trying to centre yourself somewhere, to find a place to call home, to be still. I have moved at least every six months to two years in my adult life, sometimes through choice and often not. This draws on those experiences of packing and unpacking boxes, but it also employs fiction, humour and imagination. Other poems escape fires and great white sharks, test beds and language barriers and hunt fossils and comets, spells and adventures...'
Read the blog in full on the New Welsh Review website.
Buy Better Houses from the Parthian online shop for £8.99 and free P&P
New Welsh Review Blog: Table Talk by Nathan Munday
'I was in the south of France recently and visited the chateau at Pau where Henri IV was born. They supposedly used a tortoise shell as his cradle and the whole castle has become a memorial to that monarch who famously said: ‘Paris is worth a mass’, having renounced his Protestant faith for the French throne. We were on a guided tour, and to be honest, I was not that interested in the shell, the King, the gold frames and mirrors. What did draw my attention was… a big table. I think it was one of the biggest tables I had ever seen! Apparently, it could seat one hundred guests and I started imagining the noise, the food, and all the table talk that would have taken place around it...'
Monstering review Bad ideas\Chemicals: 'both disturbingly real and terribly sad.'
Alex Haagaard gives a deep reading of Bad Ideas\Chemicals in her review on monsteringmag.com:
'It is perhaps best characterised as a slightly magical-realist dystopian satire of 21st century British neoliberalism; for all its more fantastical elements, this is a story with a very strong sense of place and time. A unique desperation pervades everything in Goregree—clinging like a film of mildew to the town's arrogantly optimistic historical architecture, and smothered under a layer of cheerful bureaucratic indifference. This is a portrait of the Welsh valleys—after the closure of the mines, and under austerity.'
'[...] Bad Ideas\Chemicals is, at its heart, an account of what it is to be a freak. It portrays with painful honesty the many ways that society lets freaks know we're not welcome here.'
'[...] both disturbingly real and terribly sad.'
Buy Bad ideas\Chemicals from our online shop for £7.99 and free P&P
