ISSUE SIX

Introduction

One of the things that attracted me to guest editing this issue of Propel was the possibility of discovering new, emerging voices whose work I didn’t know. It is a very particular time in a poet’s development, before we publish a first collection, as we start to understand and refine our process and our poems, to consider the what, how and why of it all, and to experiment and explore. With this in mind, I didn’t set out to read the submissions for any predetermined themes or approaches. I really wanted to do the opposite, to be relaxed in curating without any specific slant, to allow the language, the music, the formal properties of the poems to take shape on the page, to exist on their own terms. 

I was therefore a little surprised, once I had whittled it down from several hundred submissions, to discover that many of the poets whose work made me sit up, lean in and listen, either wrote from or around experiences of precarity. This precarity can be felt by many of us in the UK and elsewhere, at this untethered moment of reckless and punitive right-wing politics, where bills and temperatures are rising and refugees are criminalised or left to drown in the sea. 

It is a precarity of the body, of our bodies, singular and plural: whether it is the young black boy in Detroit reunited with a long-departed uncle in Elontra Hall’s haibun ‘Homesickness’; a growing health crisis amongst our unhoused populations as intimated in Jacob Mckibbin’s prose poem ‘Life Expectancy’; or the murder of the trans teenager Brianna Ghey as commemorated in Marina Scott’s elegiac ‘beat’. 

Elsewhere, we encounter ecologically alert pieces that reveal familiar landscapes in new light (‘The Host in the Hedge’, Anyonita Green; ‘Landscape with Vapour-sprayed Aubergines’, Adam Heardman) or narrate aspects of human and/or natural disaster (‘Negative capability & the tomatoes’, Claire Collison; ‘Permanent’, Cat Turhan).  

Yet while a poetics of witness is necessary as breath, a poetics of resistance may also inspire an attention to joy, via small moments of sonorous and lustrous detail, as in Aimee Skelton’s ‘To nature’ or Mark Saunders’ ‘Chipped Sound’. And there are poems here that push back with relish, with Rachel Donati’s ‘I Have Even Dreamed a Life of Perfect’ and Rosemary Corin’s ‘half the trans women in east oxford’ springing, feistily, to mind.

It has been a pleasure and an honour to edit this edition of Propel and I hope you enjoy reading the poets within it as much as I did. 

— Karen McCarthy Woolf
July 2023

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of seven literary anthologies. Shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes, her debut An Aviary of Small Birds tells the story of losing a son in childbirth and was an Observer Book of the Year. Her latest, Seasonal Disturbances, explores gentrification, the city and the sacred, was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry and excerpted in the Financial Times and the Guardian. In 2019 she moved to Los Angeles as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar and Writer in Residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA, exploring the relationship between poetry, law and capitalism’s impacts on black, brown and indigenous bodies.

She has presented and performed her work at literature festivals worldwide — in Mexico, Trinidad, Jamaica, Italy, America and China at a variety of venues such as the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican and King’s Place for Poetica Electronica, which showcased music collaborations with various dance and techno producers. Her poems have been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, Polish and Dutch, produced as animated and choreographed short film, exhibited by Poems on the Underground and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament in a poetry ‘bombing’.

Karen also writes for radio and recent highlights include a multi-authored adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando which was nominated for a BBC Audio Award in 2020 and a reversioning of Homer’s Book of the Dead in which Odysseus is reimagined as a London cab driver for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

She has served as Chair and Judge of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize several times, was a judge of the National Poetry Competition in 2021 and is currently on the judging panel of the Forward Prize and Gingko Prize.

After returning to the UK she travelled to Brazil in 2021 as an artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia to research new work that explores sugar and its cultural and material legacies.