E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

This review first appeared on the international e-zine Various Artists Review: The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War by Sumia Sukkar (Eyewear Publishing, 2013)   With its relentless accumulations of violence and random atrocity, it’s tempting to think that, from time to time, Sumia Sukkar is pushing at the bounds of plausibility in this, her debut novel. Even the briefest of surveys of the video footage which continues to emerge from the conflict in Syria, however, suggests that the mutilations, torture, street executions and other horrors described and/or alluded to in the narrative are no exaggeration. As we are reminded throughout, in fact, the tragedies endured by the main characters constitute only part of a much larger story in which an entire country is being torn apart for reasons which, to many, remain chillingly unclear. The central narrative of The Boy from Aleppo… , then, revolves around and is, for the most part, narrated by the eponymous boy: a ...

Tom Phillips reviews City State: New London Poetry Edited by Tom Chivers City State ’s editor Tom Chivers has been very careful with his choice of sub-title. It’s not, as he points out in his introduction, ‘ The New London Poetry’, it’s the much more open-ended (and significantly less megalomaniacal) ‘New London Poetry’. As they say on certain advertisements: terms and conditions apply; other new London poetries may be available. In short, Chivers actively discourages the idea that the twenty-seven contributors to his anthology represent a movement, a group or anything other than a rattle bag of writers who just happen to live in London. His only ambition, he says, is to offer a ‘snap-shot’, something ‘characteristic rather than representative; impressionistic rather than photographic’. True, there’s a slight whiff of pragmatic, pre-emptive apology to those who didn’t make the cut about this, but after the wearying tub-thumping adopted by anthologists who seem hell-bent on booming...

Tom Phillips , over at his blog, has a review of Mainstream Love Hotel .