https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/arrival-at-elsewhere

“In this book-length poem, curated by Carl Griffin, poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic. Not a definitive voice, nor an authoritative one. But a contrasting, contradicting, confused voice, set both in the UK and everywhere else, represented by one narrator who, just like the rest of us, is made up of a hundred different people. A narrator cohesive only in his/her/their contemplation of Elsewhere. Elsewhere has arrived…to everyone affected by the Covid-19 pandemic – in aid of NHS Charities Together

THE POETS - Indran Amirthanayagam, Penny Boxall, Martyn Crucefix, SJ Fowler, Linda France, John Glenday, Rebecca Goss, Philip Gross, Rachel Hadas, Matthew Haigh, Sarah Hymas, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lorraine Mariner, Chris McCabe, Richie McCaffery, Michael McKimm, Jessica Mookherjee, Abegail Morley, Katrina Naomi, Sean O’Brien, Alasdair Paterson, Jeremy Reed, Eléna Rivera, Chrys Salt, Maria Sledmere, Julian Stannard, Alina Stefanescu, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Hideko Sueoka, George Szirtes, Helen Tookey, Bogusia Wardein and many many more

PUBLISHER NOTE - When the idea for this book was pitched to us it was still fairly early in the global Covid-19 pandemic. We were all still probably in a state of shock. All locked down, uncertain what was happening – we certainly felt we had landed in a new place. All three of us, like many poets, were unsure how to creatively assess this new situation. That’s why we wanted to support this book. A collaboration of sorts, a creation of a road through all the work of poets who contributed to its making and a maker who has sensitively crafted this winding path of a poem from all our tongues. We are happy to support this work and its intention to support the NHS. Abegail Morley, Karen Dennison and Jessica Mookherjee

Big thanks to Vaughan Rapatahana in NZ for this publication. He’s part of a project that (from the site) “offers an unprecedented opportunity for voices all over the world to share, in quality fiction and non-fiction, poetry and dialogue, art and music and more, the collective experiences of the international community during COVID.” https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com

My asemic poems are very recent, taken from my upcoming book The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler with Zimzalla Press. One is a crystal and one a landscape. https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/2020/08/07/asemic-s-j-fowler/

Here is what I wrote for the site “i suppose, in a sense, a great deal of the experiences we have all gone through, if not the actual horrible sickness of covid itself, has been one of self-confrontation through lockdown’s pragmatic and practical limitations on our movements and space. in this sense then, i am interested in a poetry that acknowledges its inability to eloquently express inner dialogue, mood swings, clouded thought patterns, meaningless and often banal swings of feeling, and the expression of that. i think asemic, or semantically fraught poetry, gets to that. these poems are about synapses flashing and other things you can’t see but see anyway.”