Pages (PDF): 112
Publisher: Stonewood Press
Purchase includes: PDF

IN THIS ISSUE

[…] FOR THIS ISSUE, we read a lot of darkness. Graphic violence – especially against women – aggressive sex acts, bodily-fluids – a lot of snot and blood – war-metaphors, broken bodies, broken souls. Too much to read at once, too much to carry around in our heads. The reason for the sheer volume of it is unclear: it could be a witnessing of dark times, a presaging of times ahead of us, it could be that writers, especially poets, think this is what will get them published (and there is some evidence for that), it could be that the season calls for such things, it could be a mass expulsion of a shared anxiety – a sort of collective scream to relieve the pressure of living in our world, it could be desperate voices trying to speak to our dying planet, it could be humans needing to speak to other humans, to say ‘I’ve lived through it too’. It reminds me of Don Paterson’s poem ‘The Scale of Intensity’ building from the ‘Not felt [...] Sea like a mirror’ of the first verse to ‘Damage total […] Sea white’ of the twelfth and final verse. As editors we work with what you send us, and you sent us darkness. Not all the stories and poems in this issue are dark, and those that are have their own windows to be opened. And if the reading this time calls up the Paterson poem it doesn’t mean the world reflects it. Not yet.. (Editorial extract by Jacqueline Gabbitas)

Issue 45 of Brittle Star includes poems and stories by S.P. Hannaway, Stuart Charlesworth, Kitty Coles, Anna Robinson, Katherine Gallagher, Kenneth Durham Smith, Eva Hibbs, Robert Etty, Brian Docherty, Tina Preston, Anna Seidel, Diana Cant, Paul Blake, Kae Banner, Steven Taylor, Trish Kerrison, Di Slaney, Bianca Jaros, Miles Larmour, Anne Ryland, Eleanor Page, Sheila Martin, Sue Johns, Michael Loveday, Yuko Minamikawa Adams, Marcus Smith, Jim Conwell, Katherine Meehan, Daniel Bennett, Pascal Fallas, Sue Wallace-Shaddad

Column by Sarah Pasingham – Short Stories Don’t Have to be Short Fiction
Gavin Jones – “We With Wisest Sorrow Think” – On Ghosts, Loved and Spurious
Fawzia Muradali Kane – Cherrywood and Special Brew: Short Fiction Review

www.brittlestar.org.uk