Lovely to have this write up of my poem brut project appear on Tentacular Magazine, recounting some of the issues of the series on 3am magazine https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere-blog/brut

The sparkling Poem Brut

Poem Brut is a colourful and stimulating celebration of what lies at the intersection of the poetic page and the artwork. Curated by SJ Fowler, it’s a series of events, exhibitions, and publications – but here I’ll focus on some of the 29 works (so far) represented online in 3am magazine.

What’s impressive is the reach of the community that Fowler has assembled and is playing an important part in creating, from Tallinn to Toronto and Trinidad. Trinidad is the source of Andre Bagoo’s compelling ‘Scarlet Ibis’, where the placing of bright red rectangles over what we might assume to be lines of experimental text seems such a simple act, but invests the page with an animate quality, a jauntiness and inscrutability that may or may not be features of Trinidad and Tobago’s national bird. The work compels a kind of double longing, both for the text beneath, and for the identity and energy of pure colour, in what may also be a metaphor for (resistance to) the blood and erasure of a colonial past.........."