THE RICE LADY

While The Rice Lady can write
your name on a grain of rice
every bullet
has everyone’s name on it.

Pluribus is mixed genre: absurdist black comedy sci-fi thriller. Pigeonholing it as a “classic Mystery Box show” doesn’t alter the fact that it’s a contender for best TV show in ages. I love that it’s such slow burn, & the dialogue is superb: “You’re not my mother. My mother is a bitch.” Perfect!

Always good to get back to my birth city , with its dazzling variety of lives, each one bang at the astronomical centre of their own universe.

Matt Haig (@mattzhaig) on Threads One of the millions of Americans at the No Kings protests yesterday.

www.threads.com/@mattzhaig/p...

Bray, July 2018

The Royal wee-wee.

Stefan Tarnowski | Plausible Deniability From the sieges within the siege, Palestinian journalists are smeared as terrorists and assassinated by airstrike. Even...

Plausible Deniability www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/au...

August

Spilt blood, Dun Laoghaire pier.

Quite liking the tousled disorderliness of our bathroom window.

Tiresias, doomed to discover
that a woman can have a whole other
dimension of pleasure
that no man could measure,
attempted, in vain, to recover.

Thanks for the reminder. Poem below from my second collection, The Sky Road (Salmon, 2007):

Christopher Reid · Poem: ‘Your Biographer’

Your Biographer www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v1...

Come on people! We need you xx

POETRY LAUNCH: Mark Granier | Books Upstairs Join us at 2pm on Sunday 13th April to celebrate the launch of  Mark Granier’s new poetry collection, Everything You Always Wanted To Know, from Salmon Poetry. Niall MacMonagle will be launching the c...

Niall MacMonagle will be launching my sixth collection, Everything You Always Wanted To Know, in Books Upstairs on Sunday April 13 at 2pm.

If you’re free, do consider dropping in.

booksupstairs.ie/all-events/m...

He’s already making dim-witted claims to Canada, Panama, Greenland, etc. May be performative attention seeking but it’s a taste of what’s in store. A possible flicker at the end of a v long tunnel is that he makes the US so FUBAR that people actually see what they voted for… but sadly probably not.

I didn’t say that the “answer” is “compromise”. I merely noted that what you term “centrist spinelessness” (a term I disagree with) is immeasurably better than an autocrat & useful idiot who actively wants to dismantle democracy. That seems to me a no brainer.

What amazes me (& everyone I know here in Ireland) is that America voted for a blubbering, incurious crybaby, a traitorous rapist & self-proclaimed dictator who “fell in love” (his words) with another dictator & expressed huge admiration for many more.

Give me “centrist spinelessness” any day!

If kitty cats liked roastbeef bones,
And doggies sipped up milk;
If elephants walked round the town
All dressed in purest silk;
If robins went out coasting,
They slid down crying whee,
If all this happened to be true,
Then where would people be?

Poem by Louise Gluck at 5 years old

Don Paterson’s 101 Sonnets is excellent. Also Kay Ryan’s Synthesising Gravity and Simic’s The Life of Images.

John Clare - Poetry Archive John Clare, the son of a casual labourer, was born in Helpstone, Northamptonshire. His twin sister died a few weeks after their birth and he was brought up in poverty, only attending school very occas...

Beautiful. Farley’s reading of Clare’s The Nightingale’s Nest is a wonder:

poetryarchive.org/poet/john-cl...

PORTRAIT OF THE MAN
WHO FLOGGED THE BIBLE

When he lies, he speaks
his native language
for he is a liar
and the father of lies.

(John 8: 44)

Exhausted flute, Bray, Co Wicklow

Accidental homage to Miro

Strong stuff. I can feel it burning too.

Pavement fossil

Hey, finally managed to reactivate my account!

I still have a Twitter account, but I intend to gradually migrate to the saner country.

Hello every/anyone.

ENTROPY

Heat death of the universe, don’t worry,
I’m already there, ahead of you.
I’ll turn out the light.