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Subcritical Tests: A Film

About Subcritical Tests:

The nearness of nuclear holocaust, always just one clumsy accident away, forms an entry point into this record of a friendship. The poems in Subcritical Tests stubbornly make connections, ever conscious of the impending threat of annihilation. Oblique, modern, lyrical, humorous, these poems represent the range of Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler‘s individual practices, modulated and melded through the collaborative process.

Coming soon from gorse editions

Poetry Now/Mountains to Sea

 

The gorse reading at Mountains To Sea Book Festival took place on Friday 24 March 2017, and was part of its Poetry Now strand, curated by Alice Lyons. Bringing together three contributors from across the issues, it added a performative and multi-disciplinary aspect to the festival programme. Aodán MccCardle opened the event with a short performance-writing set, which led to the reading of a series of texts involving repetition, interruption and erasure. Christodoulos Makris read the entirety of his limited edition pamphlet if we keep drawing cartoons, its delivery beginning at the back of the auditorium and gradually moving to the front. Suzanne Walsh performed text from her commission to the exhibition A Different Republic, accompanied by an audio piece interrupting the vocalisation of the writing. The performances were followed by the launch of gorse no. 8, accompanied with a reading by Dimitra Xidous from her essay ‘We Cannot Be Trusted With Chairs’ which features in the issue. Our thanks to Alice Lyons and Poetry Now for their invitation to participate in Mountains To Sea 2017.

Only lovers left

Elizabeth_Smart_at_Kingsmere

Danielle McLaughlin in the Irish Times, ‘The stories that writers love’:

It was Claire-Louise Bennett’s essay, I am Love, in gorse magazine, that led me to read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept. The novella, by Elizabeth Smart, is intense, unsettling and fierce; it’s not a story of a sweet and gentle love, more about love of the obsessive, all-consuming, obliterating kind. “IT is coming. The magnet of its imminent finger draws each hair of my body, the shudder of its approach disintegrates kisses, loses wishes on the disjointed air. The wet hands of the castor-tree at night brush me and I shriek, thinking that at last I am caught up with.’

As it is Valentines, and as the essay is in the now sold out gorse no. 2, we are sharing Claire-Louise Bennett’s essay online for one week only. You can read it here. Enjoy.