Blog: Our new Poetry Editors Golnoosh Nour and Matthew Bates

What We’re Looking For:

We’re interested in poetry that touches upon themes of difference: the sordid, the outlawed, the abject, the sinister, the uncanny; poems that map through words, states of alterity. Poems of translation, manipulation, intimacy, and atmosphere. Poems with jagged edges or poems with no edges at all. Poems that leave the page invigorated or destroyed.

We savour the immediacy of poetry and the connectivity that the poet brings to the reader in an intimate exchange.

Theme suggestions:

Transgression

Risk

Taste

Compulsion

Defamiliarisation

Chaos

The City The city fascinates and enables. It promises infinite opportunities, thrills and danger. It can be a space to hide, or a space in which to be seen. But if urban space is a host space – its experience one of transience – then how does intimacy survive/thrive in the city?

Rituals Do we create our own rituals incidentally? Or are they formed from a subconscious need for order in chaos?

The Body Simone de Beauvoir wrote: ‘The body is a situation’. And yet the body is also the boundary of the self…

Matt Bates is Editor-at-Large for Muswell Press and the former Fiction Buyer for WHSmith Travel where he curated the award-winning Fresh Talent promotion. He has judged The Costa Prize, The Jerwood Prize, The Bookseller’s Association, The Romantic Novelists’ Association and LoveReading Short Story Prize. He completed a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at Birkbeck and studying an MA in English Literature at Glasgow University. He co-edited the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love with Dr Golnoosh Nour.

Golnoosh Nour is the author of The Ministry of Guidance and Other Stories. Her poetry collection Rocksong will be published in October 2021 by Verve Poetry Press. Her work has also been published in Granta, Columbia Journal, and Poetry Anthology amongst others. Golnoosh has performed her work across the UK and internationally. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Reading. She’s the co-editor of Magma 80 and the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love forthcoming with Muswell Press.