Literatures

As a child I ate mud. It tasted of grit and peat and wild churning and something I could never find a name for. Later I became a moongazer always squinting through windows, believing...

Described as 'one of the finest poets writing in India today’ Arundhathi Subramaniam was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1967. She is the author of twelve books, including five volumes of poetry. Widely translated...

So this is what I’m here for, to see inside the mute weight of my right breast, heavy handful of treasure I longed for as a girl, crying behind the curtain in the Guerlain sisters’ corset...

I didn’t know that when my mother died, her grave would be dug in my body. And when I weaken, she is here, dressing behind the closet door, hooking up her long-line cotton bra, then...

Unique, I think, is the Scottish tartle, that hesitation when introducing someone whose name you’ve forgotten and what could capture cafuné, the Brazilian Portuguese way to say running your fingers, tenderly, through someone’s hair? Is there...

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping, which this baby is. I can just...

I have not yet read the complete work of Ellen Bass but I find her one of the most interesting contemporary authors for the writing process very engaged in themes that are not easily...

I am swimming on this hot May day on a deserted beach in my white skin I learned to swim in Minneapolis lakes, one named after a slave-owner, Calhoun Every time I put my face in I...

None of us really wants it, do we? Poetry is the new rock’n’roll – the fame, the fortune, the snowdrifts of cocaine? The megastores stuffed with slim volumes, the stadia packed with hysterical fans. Seamus Heaney struts through his...

Tom Phillips was born in Buckinghamshire in 1964. He is a freelance writer and guest lecturer at various British and Balkan universities. He has lived in Bristol, UK, since 1986, but since the 2000s...