Two poems written during the major uprisings of Palestinian resistance against ongoing Israeli occupation in 2021. ‘Word for Faith’ considers the false promise made to the Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948 that they would one day return. It examines the necessity of a wilful faith in the words of an oath or a vow in order for language itself to function successfully, and yet, the inevitable vacuousness of political rhetoric. ‘Homecoming’ offers an account of a displaced Palestinian visiting their homeland, the premeditated ways in which this is made into an arduous and intimidating process, and, in spite of this, their perpetual — seemingly ethereal — bond with the land.

This is an extract from 'Dissonance and Authenticity,' a meditation on class, staircases, and meritocracy. It begins by describing interdependent classes as a higher dimensional knot projected onto the present, meanders through grades and discipline and job hunts, and ends with a discussion of intergenerational eating habits. “The only thing more provinicial than provinciality is the critique of provincialism, you can extrapolate from that.”

Tracing 'the sentimentality of the ultimate predator' within a dying island and its hostile ecology, this long poem is concerned with resilient co-living, trans embodiment, and a loving eschatology

3 poems from Christopher Kirubi taking us through Sembène, passion, duration and white waterbreath

Lost in the glasshouse of ambient refraction, this is a sprawling, bittersweet and transitive attempt to vomit the 'milkshakes of futures' shook up in late capital's dead mall infinities

Perverts is a long poem sutured out of my recorded dreams and the recorded dreams of friends, lovers and strangers

Most of these poems have arrived from travels in a van during the pandemic, drawn to being in water both in winter and summer, both alien and integral: ‘His melancholic dip unable to float past postscript fixations of a drowning fiction’

Cycle into repetition’s clarity,/radiant image dump in perfect/reproduction, this is the/present you wanted, the moment

The poem works to personalise the more abstracted ruminations on cultures of violence and domination that circulate through the collection Communicatingroups by Stu Watson.

Hatty Nestor's poems are from a longer book that explores suspended temporal states, such as chronic pain, immunity, guilt, carceral logic and economies of time, the nature of confessing, and institutional surveillance.

3 poems from Carlos Mauricio Rojas that talk about themes of migration, queer and trans existence, and multicultural heritage.