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‘Love Is A Many Splintered Thing’ Andrew Eldritch, Ribbons
Abridged__47 A Many Splintered Thing 5.
Clare McCotter
27.
Nadia Sablin
6.
Gerald Yelle
28.
Jenny Hope
7.
Irina Popova
29.
Bieke Depoorter
8.
Colin Dardis
30.
Emily Robards
9.
Jana Romanova
31.
Irina Popova
10.
Matthew Ryan Shelton
32.
Gerald Dawe
11.
Nadia Sablin
33.
Jana Romanova
12.
Moyra Donaldson
34.
Jenny Hope
13.
Bieke Depoorter
35.
Nadia Sablin
14.
Morgan Downie
36.
Jane Robinson
15.
Irina Popova
37.
Bieke Depoorter
16.
Katherine Stevens
38.
Jan Harris
17.
Jana Romanova
39.
Jana Romanova
18.
Deirdre Hines
40.
Revd PG Burke
19.
Nadia Sablin
41.
Irina Popova
20.
Orla Fay
42.
Mik Davis
21.
Bieke Depoorter
43.
Bieke Depoorter
22.
Susanna Galbraith
44.
Jenny Hope
23.
Irina Popova
45.
Nadia Sablin
24.
Jessica Traynor
46.
Maria Isakova Bennett
25.
Jana Romanova
47.
Irina Popova
26.
Barbara Morton
48.
Stephanie Conn
Front Covers by: Bieke Depoorter, Irina Popova, Jana Romanova, Nadia Sablin.
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Contents
Splinters
“while everywhere love is breathing draftily” Frank O’Hara
“Lock the door. In the dark journey of our night,/ two childhoods stand in the corner of the bedroom/ watching the way we take each other to bits/ to stare at our heart”
You will find it in your pocket like lint. It is the gunk in the cracks between the things we are sure of seeing, the unperceivable stuff between the senses. You might call it love when you find yourself picking parts of another person from your skin, particles that have been wedged into your pores like soil or grime under your fingernails. It is the still morning-light that bleaches our senses and lets us see the pimpled mossy stuff of love in its stark mundanity. The constant expansion of time drags against the climactic instants of love and their fullness. Its potent moments are dissolved into our days and disseminated among those gathered closely around us, becoming the domestic dust that falls and fills the little crevices of our existence. We are not accustomed to complete fullness, and do not have the capacity to sustain it. Love therefore must splinter into our long ordinary days. We must fluctuate lest we are to die from love and its devastating totality. We must choose whether to erupt with its moments or to survive by allowing it to fray like a flexible and dependable cord.
Our sense of love is conjured vaguely in our sleep, without sound or alphabet, by the mixing of smells - of our particular detergent, of breakfast crumbs, of tired bodies in tired bedsheets. In its most familiar and continuous state, as it pulses on residually after its fleeting climax, it is registered in the act of nesting. A yearning for home rumbles deep in our gut from the trauma of birth. Home, our mantra-hum, our unitary ideal, is our blanket protection against the vast indifference of the chaotic expanse into which we are born, small and alone. Home is a little, contracted world with which we have the capacity to contend. In nesting we willingly enclose ourselves within a cultivated living space that will fuse its occupants in its singular atmosphere, blending their breath which condenses as one substance on their shared walls.
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Carol Ann Duffy
The greater human world splinters automatically into these microcosms, pockets in which we might be emotionally sustained by the closeness of familiars whose own splintered selves become splints for our weaknesses. Love is the minute detail, the micro-activity of our species in these living spaces, the automatic and wordless affection, skin to skin. We might learn love from those in our homes. It could be called a familial trait: how to love, why to love, what love looks like. Often we will imitate these crayon visions as we venture out to seek for ourselves the formulas that might satisfactorily conjure the smells of our childhood, or our particular sense of love. In the perpetually human pursuit of love we are self-seeking. Something in us, in our inherent physical symmetry and the unfathomability of our own isolated minds, suggests that self might only be revealed in other. Our bodies seem to remember a duality that is countered by our experience of subjectivity. Something has left us splintered. We might consider love the nesting of self within other, when duality glints into a composite oneness, the jagged splinters of our individualities interlocking with others like clasping fingers. It is a closing in. Thanks to the artists and poets, curator Susanne Stich, Void Gallery, and the British Council for making this issue possible.
Out there where the crossing caravan is a dark comet they have discovered planets beyond the solar system measured the age of the oldest star and spread a thousand red carnations across the desert’s frozen floor.
It could have been southern winds forcing the Atacama’s secret garden to flower beneath their feet splinters of rib and jaw a scrap of cloth of shrivelled skin and unfound the nowhere relics of the disappeared.
Three times this week she dreamed a swallow nesting in the eaves of his brain leaves its clutch of speckled eggs wakening each dawn to the curled up memory of a fairly ordinary Sunday afternoon.
Gathered together they are taken again so science can make its mark giving her back more than most the shard of skull bone she wakes in a government office finding in its fissures an ovoid etched with seedling feathers
The last one they spent at home before he became a piece in a black jigsaw buried in the Valley of The Moon its luciferous heart pierced still with the shovel she gripped day on dry day for seventeen years.
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Editorial
Clare McCotter
I Feel a Little Drummy – If You Don’t Mind My Saying
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I felt a twinge in my thigh and reached in my pocket and pulled out a crushed, smoldering Marlboro and squeezed a few drags through the scorched filter. –How anyone can claim satisfaction without putting the past behind is beyond me: A past near a fountain Jimmy stuck his feet in, sneakers and all, and just like that without bothering to clear my throat, there I was: buying groceries at midnight, swearing at kids, taking communion in the mouth instead of my hand like a 21st Century Christian, and Jimmy’s mom –She loved her father more than she ever loved me –though he kept giving vent to face-smacking rage. He’d be on the floor –blood like black mud dripping from his lip and she’d run to him. And her mother would stand on a stool with her back to the balcony, posing for her grandson’s camera: It’s lucky she landed on the floor and not the street twenty feet down. I saw Jimmy at the mall and said hi. The kid he was with gave a look and asked Jimmy who I was. He said, My mom’s… and squinted. What he had to say was bitter. It wasn’t stepdad or boyfriend. What he spat out was date.
Gerald Yelle
Opposite: Irina Popova, from Anfisa’s Family series (2012)
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Harvest
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We group instruments of sleep about us: gum shield, throat spray, ear plugs, bodies given in set agreement. We take up our positions, defenders to each other’s parapet. Arms at rest, love’s security. In Summer, we require less than our skins; dreams broken from the heat, stray images kindling for the stars. Come November, supplements of blanket, gowns, pepper the bed with one poppy red hot water bottle. We go to our little deaths together, awaiting the morphine touch of Somnus. These are our soft times.
Colin Dardis
Opposite: Jana Romanova, from Waiting series, (2009-12)
Rounding for K, on her 29th birthday
Our embellishments belie our age, each line a worked erratum, each substratum a correction in the script of an exchange, or in a deferent response to rain. The stones of the boundary wall between us ache in heavy weather. What we gather in the memory, each time we rearrange the stones, is what we weather in remembering. The stones consolidate and cleave: in landscapes: mountains, jungles in windows, Phoenician coasts and cabinets: a failed rift, sometimes the erratics of glacial moraines: a rational polka-dot dress hung on the hook on the back of the bathroom door for weeks now (I am sorry I scribbled
Matthew Ryan Shelton
figures of speech etching the errata we incur in years, perusing recipes for pickled onions, and the dishes in the sink after every dinner, after every morning after.
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in your copy of Sartor Resartus. Somehow, I am sure, we will find a way to patch things up): framed photographs of wanderers in the barcans on Newcastle beach:
Opposite: Nadia Sablin, from Aunties series (2008-14)
Rathmullan and back via Letterkenny
On the way out, we are accompanied by a crippled connemara pony, a shotgun, and a tiny nebulous foetus, no bigger than a heartbeat. On the way back they’ve been joined by a honeymoon hotel, a dead pug and a teenage girl with a bottle of blue WKD. They float and rattle along behind us like balloons and tin cans tied to the back bumper of a wedding car.
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Moyra Donaldson
Opposite: Bieke Depoorter, from Ou Menya series, (2008-09)
blood moon
call that moon carnelian, a hanging jasper polished smooth, dark quartzes dendritic veins, pattern the surface as if by a palmprint call our memories an agate the dying of a volcanic fire broods carmine, sand layered as onyx. the stone lies heavy in the hand but still precious as any gemstone
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we are not lettered scarlet we were always crimson together, bright iron, the quickening heart, no goodbyes for you and i not until the last second
Morgan Downie
Opposite: Irina Popova, from Anfisa’s Family series (2012)
HOUSED
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Heavy with the snores of all the young’uns boxed and buffered by my binding timber. Oh the slumber of my beating innards – what a way to waste the nights. Myself, I never slept at all, but often talked at length with moonshine starlight lamp and shadow till today became tomorrow. Then I empty slowly surely of my bairns and broken creatures, people in a skin of sleep that hangs upon their frames like webs of morphine till they trickle back to me, who has been waiting. Solitary. Patient. Strange to think that while they have been dreaming lives, I know that all they are is tired.
Katherine Stevens
Opposite: Jana Romanova, from Waiting series, (2009-12)
ALWAYS
No less now than then is the light that falls across the river florentineNo less now than then are the pillows that catch dreamflakes snowlinesNo less now than then can ambered figments serpentineNo less now than then can eagle hooded eyes mesmerizeNo less then than now abridged __ p.19
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can glance Vermeer guillotineNo less now than thenNot more then than nowDeirdre Hines
Opposite: Nadia Sablin, from Aunties series (2008-14)
Looking-glass
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Make me like the leaves in the distance Dappled and far away and I will invent myself. Oh you can never know me from the pieces of me, Shattered glass of a mirror all over the floor And who can tell of the true reflection then That once was, never was, was lost – is! Who can say but I looked at you too long, Too long and you have no features, I may have swallowed every part of you. You are not there anymore. You disappeared. There is nothing in not existing. You are dead. But you don’t know, do you? Do you know That I’ll feel a piece of glass that I swallowed Cut and I’ll see a reflection of myself And it will be you I see, terribly true? And I never knew, I never knew, I never knew.
Orla Fay
Opposite: Bieke Depoorter, from Ou Menya series, (2008-09)
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[green]
i found my little heart to be so green so deep in a great charcoal wound of forest green skins wrapped tight around itself clenched and lidded like a clenched shut eye beating little bud, little bird
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Susanna Galbraith
Opposite: Irina Popova, from Anfisa’s Family series (2012)
Long Winter
All that’s needed to end this long winter is one night in which to indulge our foolish notions of each other: you, the perpetual wanderer, some seldom-seen Melmoth come to colour drab streets, to drag your heart behind you, spit-and-polish it for me to accept like a girl given a clotted red rose. And me, the driven one, head down in the convent of my busy schedule, accounting for everything but my time, the scale of days falling
Jessica Traynor
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as you reach out; our failings littering the bed between us.
Opposite: Jana Romanova, from Waiting series, (2009-12)
A Tri-Fold Bond Is Not Easily Broken
Abide by the cedar tree beyond the cordon of pear. And don’t be afraid. And don’t be dismayed. Set about your daily tasks. Do thy diligence To come. Come shortly. Calumus. And cinnamon. Like also, camphire In the middle of the garden. And the tree grew. It was toward evening. A small matter in my eye And no sign of my fellow helper. A cluster of sweet wild grape. Golden. Ounches of gold. A little water fetched.
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I imagine him to be the Gardener. Don’t leave me. Don’t love me. Remember me.
Barbara Morton
Opposite: Nadia Sablin, from Aunties series (2008-14)
First Snow
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It falls, a kiss to an eye. The keenness surprises like a night-burst of glitter. The land prickles, and waits. Fingers fill the dips between hills, touch our opened mouths. Hands fall deep. The land presses together. Each embrace finds itself. Our palms make good their presence, softness settles, the muffled moon watches and snow speaks with the sound of us.
Jenny Hope
Opposite: Bieke Depoorter, from Ou Menya series, (2008-09)
I can deal with none of this, Yet.... If I can bear it a while longer, I will hear her soul.
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Emily Robards
Opposite: Irina Popova, from Anfisa’s Family series (2012)
Paul Henry, Moonlight
When I roll over to your side of the bed I could be crossing a moonlit strand in Mayo. Then I think again.
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Far from the likes of Killala, the tide is really just where you and I are standing alone, as still as anything.
Gerald Dawe
Opposite: Jana Romanova, from Waiting series, (2009-12)
Winter Orchard
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A twist of bark and your breath ghosts, blurs my tongue while frost-lit trees dream; their heads clustered by forgotten mistletoe. A finished moon watches, the ground is full with wasted apples. Grass breaks underfoot.
Jenny Hope
Opposite: Nadia Sablin, from Aunties series (2008-14)
The Empty Spaces
Jane Robinson
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There is no space between these pebbles jumbled together each one contacting several others washed up onto the ramparts of the sea wall. Only when we pick with deliberating fingers special stones from among the scraps of broken glass and plain stones do we get something to arrange on the page, something that allows spaces to intervene. Today I have made a collection of terrible masks: The Scream, an elephant-headed monster, a pocked monkey head. The spaces between them are mistakes we have made, the stones shouting about what we might have done differently. Opposite: Bieke Depoorter, from Ou Menya series, (2008-09)
tangled
Jan Harris
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skin against skin bruise against purple bruise we are Plasticine figures coalesced no beginning and no ending to us beyond our tangled bedclothes our room within a room the digital glow of standby lights traps ghosts of furniture colour and form cast like skins of snakes we drift into the here and yet not here awake and yet not awake waiting for the pull of sleep to unravel our togetherness before tomorrow rushes between us
Opposite: Jana Romanova, from Waiting series, (2009-12)
Loss
It was not many months ago as I panted, carrying him up to bed, that he said: ‘I wish I was strong like you;’ only weeks since, watching me clumsily batter a nail into wood, he asked with wonder: ‘How can you do that?’ But now he is six. Today he looks at where my crown slightly thins and coolly observes: ‘You’re losing your hair.’
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He sees my mortality; his blinkers are lost.
Revd PG Burke
Opposite: Irina Popova, from Anfisa’s Family series (2012)
Seattle
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A garbage truck passes an 87 plymouth with more holes than wheels, The truck breaks, bounces and sways to the rhythm of the wind, Steam rises from the gutter, the last breath of a city, teasing the sidewalk, A voice echoes - a glimmer, a tremor – the truck transforming, consuming, then gone. Water gathers inside the edge of a rusting coke can – 01/12/93, A damp record sleeve lay beside it, an offering, a candle, a memento mori. Now dust skits and scurries, just left of an empty butane cannister, Wind chimes reverberate on a moiled porch, tortured and menacing - bleached. And the tall thin man stands in the doorway, leering, thrift shop negative, he sighs.
Mik Davis
Opposite: Bieke Depoorter, from Ou Menya series, (2008-09)
Daneway, 1969Â
The wire-caged moon cuts through sky. Night-skinned. Blood-let. Light-stretch on skin. My hair finger-twists trees and breath kisses cloud.
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The tree-line blurs.
Jenny Hope
Opposite: Nadia Sablin, from Aunties series (2008-14)
Habibi
leans in close – strikes his breast like a confession offers his open hand to me strikes his breast offers his open hand
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big love, he says shakes his head presses his lips like a prayer closes his eyes, and I close mine and feel a shift like the stagger of a lift and a fall to where some words can only be felt
Habibi: Arabic for my love;
Maria Isakova Bennett
Opposite: Irina Popova, from Anfisa’s Family series (2012)
Contributors
We have been here before, but not like this – four beds filled to the brim. Back then we brought a tent, zipped sleeping bags together to make a double. Couldn’t stop making love. We remember different things; I recall the exact incline of this shadowed street. You don’t remember being here. I have seen these lakes before laid out in front of us, flanked on either side by dark mountains. We sat at the highest point, captured all that lay below us on a roll of film. abridged __ p.48
We didn’t stop at this low point – but there is beauty here, in the flat stony shore, the swamped edges.
Stephanie Conn
Maria Isakova Bennett lives in Liverpool. She is a teacher, artist, and poet. In the past two years Maria has had work published in, among others, Prole, Crannog, Envoi, Orbis, Manchester Review, The Interpreter’s House, Antiphon, and Abridged. During 2014 Maria was highly commended in the Gregory O’ Donoghue Poetry Competition, shortlisted in the Munster Literature Chapbook Competition, and in July she was awarded first prize in the Ver Open Competition. In February this year, Maria’s first pamphlet, Caveat, was published by Poetry Bus. The Rev Patrick Burke is the Church of Ireland rector of Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny. A former broadcaster, soldier, and sailor, he is a regular correspondent to the letters pages of the Irish Times and a contributor to RTE Radio One’s ‘The Living Word.’ He blogs at http:// thewayoutthere1.blogspot.com/ Stephanie Conn was born in Newtownards, Co. Down, in 1976. Her poetry has been widely published. She was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize, highly commended in the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. She is a graduate of the MA programme the Seamus Heaney Centre. Stephanie is a recipient of an Arts Council Career Enhancement Award and recently won the inaugural Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Her first poetry collection is due to be published by Doire Press in autumn 2015. Colin Dardis is a poet, editor, creative writer tutor and arts facilitator, based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His work has been published in numerous anthologies, journals and zines throughout Ireland, the UK and the USA. Colin co-runs Poetry NI, in which he is the editor of FourXFour and Pen Points Press. Mik Davis has a lifelong interest in poetry and is the lead singer of Indie/Post Grunge band Monster Jaw. He has travelled extensively but currently makes home in Bradford UK. Mik also creates, produces and records background music for fellow poets such as Joolz Denby, James Nash and Mathew Hedley-Stoppard.
Gerald Dawe’s most recent collection, Mickey Finn’s Air is published by Gallery Press. The Stoic Man: Poetry Memoirs and Early Poems will appear shortly from Lagan. Paul Henry, Moonlight, commissioned by Janet McLean to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland, was included in the exhibition and anthology Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art, 2014 to whom kind acknowledgement is made. Bieke Depoorter (born 1986) received her master’s degree in photography from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent in 2009. She works mostly on autonomous projects. In 2009, she travelled through Russia, photographing people in whose homes she had spent a single night for her series Ou Menya, which won several prizes, including the Magnum Expression Award, and led to a book, published in 2011. Currently Bieke is publishing her second book: I Am About to Call it a Day, a similar long-term project in the United States. She continues working on In Between (In Egypt). Originally a member of the Paris-based photo agency/collective Tendance Floue, Bieke is now an associate member at Magnum Photos. Moyra Donaldson is an award winning poet and creative writing facilitator from Co Down. She has published six collections of poetry including Selected Poems (2012), and The Goose Tree (2014) from Liberties Press, Dublin. Also widely published in magazines, journals and anthologies in both Europe and the USA, her latest project was a collaboration with photographic artist Victoria J Dean resulting in an exhibition and the publication Abridged 0 -36 Dis-Ease. Morgan Downie writes short stories and poetry. He has been anthologised widely, appearing in collections such as the Macallan and Orange short fiction prizes and the Scottish National Galleries collections for poetry. He has been shortlisted for the Bridport prize and is a competition winner in the aforementioned National Galleries poetry competition. His first collection stone and sea was published by Calder Wood press. He has followed this up with distances, a photopoetry collection in English and Romanian, and a lazarus, a chapbook length collection that was shortlisted for the qartsilunni prize. He is a keen cyclist and not shy of a canoe. These are always competing activities for his time.
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Between the Mountains
Susanna Galbraith studies English at Trinity College Dublin. Her poetry has been published in Icarus Magazine, JoLT, Abridged and Belleville Park Pages. Jan Harris is a Nottinghamshire-born poet. So far this year her work has been accepted for publication in Snakeskin, Envoi, and Poems for a Liminal Age anthology, and for the Northern Health and Social Services Trust’s ‘Colour of Poetry’ exhibition. Two poems were highly commended in the 2015 Chipping Sodbury poetry competition.
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Deirdre Hines is an award winning playwright and poet. She was the first woman to win The Stewart Parker Award for Best New Play with “Howling Moons, Silent Sons”. Her first poetry collection “The Language of Coats” was published by New Island Press (2012, and includes the poems that won her the Listowel Poetry Collection (2011). She has had poems published in various magazines, such as Deep Water Literary Journal, The Bombay Review, The Screech Owl and The Lake.
Reflexion, Revival, The SHOp and The Stinging Fly. Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, was published in 2012. Home is Kilrea, County Derry.
she challenges herself with experiments, where she becomes a part of different communities, questions her own identity and explores the medium of photography works as a power through classification, systematisation and falsification, being something that is “created” by any community. Her long-term documentary projects were selected for a number of international exhibitions and festivals such as Encontros da Imagem (Braga, Portugal), the Backlight Festival (Tampere, Finland), Encuentros Abietros Festival (Buenos Aires, Argentina) «Perchance to Dream» at Andrea Meislin Gallery (New York, USA), “New Saint-Petersburg” at Nieuw Dakota Gallery (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), “Me, myself and I” by Anzenberger Gallery (Vienna, Austria), etc. and got several prizes and honourable mentions in photography all over the world. http://janaromanova.com
Barbara A Morton, White Porcelain Bowls ~ Special limited edition of twenty-four. Hand-printed. Japanese style clothbound. Available from wjm@entropiebooks.com Irina Popova, born in Tver in 1986, grew up amid the upheavals of post-Soviet Russia. She began working as a journalist and photographer at age sixteen, and won her first prize a year later. After studying for a time under press photographer Sergey Maximishin in St Petersburg, she found herself in the Caucasus in 2008 when war broke out between Russia and Georgia, and publication of her images in the magazines Russian Reporter and Ogoniok confirmed her reputation as a committed photojournalist. In conflict zones and on the fringes of society she combines a sharp eye with a deep humanity, in the tradition of Americans like Eugene Smith, Nan Goldin and Jessica Dimmock
Emily Robards is a writer and artist from County Limerick Ireland, were she currently lives and works. She graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2014 where she received a first class honors degree in Printmaking and Contemporary Practice. Drawing on the tradition of black-out poetry she uses found text relating to Jenny Hope is a writer, poet and workshop facilitator based in the subconscious, generating new narratives and personal myths. Worcestershire, UK. Her collection Petrolhead was published in 2010 For more work please visit: http://www.emilyrobards.com http:// by Oversteps Books. She is currently working on her second collection. emilyrobardspoetry.tumblr.com Her websites are www.jennyhope.co.uk and www.poetrymaker.co.uk Jane Robinson lives in Dublin and won the Strokestown International Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in Poetry Prize in 2014. Her work has been published in The Stinging many parts of the world. She won the IHS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Fly, Southword, CanCan, Poetry24, Science Meets Poetry, The Sunday Award 2010 and 2011. In 2013 she won The British Tanka Award. Tribune, Census, Magma, Abridged and Poetry Ireland Review. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Her poetry has Jana Romanova is a photographer, based in Saint-Petersburg. She was appeared in Abridged, Boyne Berries, The Cannon’s Mouth, Crannóg, born in 1984 in Russia, and got a degree in journalism from SaintCyphers, Decanto, Envoi, Iota (forthcoming), Irish Feminist Review, Petersburg State University. Currently she works with photography, The Leaf Book Anthology 2008, The Linnet’s Wings, The Moth video and installations to investigate the theme of collective identities Magazine, A New Ulster, The Poetry Bus (forthcoming), Poetry24, in Russia and former Soviet Union countries. As a photographer
Abridged__47 A Many Splintered Thing No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. Copyright remains with authors/artists. abridged is a division of The Chancer Corporation, c/o Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry - Londonderry BT48 6PU. website: www.abridgedonline.com facebook:abridged zero-nineteen twitter: @abridged030 telephone: 028 7126 6946 email: abridged@ymail.com
Nadia Sablin, a native of Russia, earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002 and an MFA from Arizona State University in 2011. A freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, Sablin has received the Firecracker Photographic Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Grant, and was named one of the Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Photographers in 2011. Her work has been featured in such publications as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Moscow Times, Slate, The New Yorker, American Photo, the Calvert Journal, and the Financial Times. Nadia Sablin’s photographs have been seen in solo and group exhibitions across the US, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Bellevue College in Washington, and Texas Women’s University School of Art. In 2015 Sablin received the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Her first monograph will be published in November 2015.
Matthew Ryan Shelton was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds degrees from Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Connecticut, where he is currently working towards a PhD in 20th- and 21st-Century Poetics, focusing on translation as poiesis and poetic translation of the Atlantic Archipelago. He has contributed poetry, translations, and reviews to such publications as Poetry Proper, The Open Ear, and Critical Bastards Magazine in Northern Ireland, as well as Long River Review, Ellipsis, The Swarthmore Review, and Coldfront in the United States. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Katherine Stevens is an actress and a writer, and is going into her final year as a student at the University of Exeter. This is the first time her poetry has been published. Jessica Traynor is a Dublin poet whose first collection Liffey Swim was published last year by Dedalus Press. She has poems forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review and has recently had poems featured in Hallelujah for Fifty Foot Women (Bloodaxe) and broadcast on Sunday Miscellany on RTE. Gerald Yelle teaches high school English. The Holyoke Diaries is his first published collection. A second, Mark My Word and the New World Order is scheduled to be published by The Pedestrian Press. He is a member of the Florence (MA) Poets Society. He can be reached at g. yelle@comcast.net. Website:geraldyelle.blogspot.com. Abridged Personnel Project Cordinator/Editor: Gregory McCartney sees no purple light crashing out of you. Editorial Assistant: Susanna Galbraith studies English at Trinity College Dublin. Her poetry has been published in Icarus Magazine, JoLT, Abridged and Belleville Park Pages
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Orla Fay is the editor of Boyne Berries Magazine. Her poetry has appeared in Abridged, Boyne Berries, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, The SHOp, Revival, Riposte, The Linnet’s Wings, Orbis, Carillon, Wordlegs, Ropes and North West Words, among others. She keeps a blog at http://www.orlafay.blogspot.com
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Back Cover
Cover: Pieter Hugo: Jatto with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007, Nigeria 2007 from Gadawan Kura’ - The Hyena
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Men series II Š Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York.
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PURE DESIGNS
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A Many Splintered Thing