Friendly Street New Poets 15

Louise McKenna - A Lesson in Being Mortal
This is the work of a writer who revels in language and what it can do. The poems take journeys, they move, they are aware of their geography as poems, as well as the world's geography, its noise and silence, its little and large histories.

Lynette Arden - A Pause in the Conversation
These insightful and alert poems deal with the everyday - in its beguiling mix of mundanity and strangeness. There is also a sense of something hard-won, of a courage in living and writing that can face 'the end game' while digging for 'a new beginning'.

Sher-ee Furtak-Ellis - Natural Intervention
These poems are challenging and immediate; they pull no punches. They are full of jagged energy, of rhyme and beat, but also lyric imagery. This is about some hard experience, about choices you make and live with, about anger and grace, despair and celebration.

'I was looking for writers offering the reader something more dynamic in language, so that below the last line of the poem something is still happening. In the end I chose the following three manuscripts … these were the ones that stayed in the mind, that insisted, the ones that I could not let go.' - Jill Jones