Alle Bloom is third poet of the week with her fantastic poem Flowerbeds

Damani Dennisur is our poet of the week

Kayleigh Hicks reviews the events of Uni-Slam 2017 and the University of Manchester’s team, where Manchester poets performed a piece about art dying and were ironically penalised for going over the time limit

Elliot Mills muses on the existance of Hardy’s Well and Lemn Sissay’s wall poem

Roma Havers joins forces with Manchester’s poetry community in response to the Manchester Evening News article ‘Why Manchester should be crowned the capital of poetry’

Jake Piazza reviews The Creative Writing Society’s Slam on the 15th of November and introduces UniSlam and Manchester’s 2017 team

Books editor Roma Havers interviews the poet Lemn Sissay on his new book Gold from the Stone and his role as Chancellor of the University of Manchester

Dale Edwards reviews Lemn Sissay’s performance at the 8th Black and Asian Conference on the 8th of October 2016 at Contact Theatre and his new book Gold From the Stone

You’re always there but never quite here. Letters flow through your veins as you breath rhetoric; your heart an amalgam of emojis I sit… waiting… watching… … anticipating the response… My solitude satiated with interaction, I’m no longer sure if I am ever alone. And I wonder… what makes you different from the other skeletons […]

A featured poem by Books Contributor Elizabeth Gibson (@Grizonne)

Benjamin Mortimer takes a look at the 19th Century essayist Thomas de Quincey’s view of drug culture, highlighting parallels with the present day

Roma Havers reviews the unique celebration of the 60th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl

Ola Youssef reviews Fuel Café’s charity poetry event, Love Takes Guts, in aid of organ donation

Katherine Horrex tells us what’s going down at Manchester Literature Festival 2015

Find out what’s new with the Manchester Creative Writing Society and how you can get involved

A quick glance at upcoming writing competitions, including cash prizes for the financially-challenged student

Book Editor Yasmin Mannan investigates how the Young London Poet Laureate, Warsan Shire, has been exposing the suffering of refugees through the written word for years

Food Editor Ellie Gibbs takes up poetry for her review of literary-themed Didsbury restaurant, Volta

Lauren Gorton reviews Dominic Berry’s poetry performance for LGBT History month at Manchester Central Library

Intensely readable and relatable, Hawaiian Shirts in the Electric Chair reaches out to the disengaged and apathetic—with a trace of hope