IT IS THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN.
Our time at Mascara Bar last year at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival is burned into our memories as a time of ecstatic joy. Come and join New River Press and Jan Noble again this year to stamp around Stamford Hill's late night utopia. Stretch out the bright summer night with poems and dancing. Sit at tables with small cheap beers chatting. Fill the city with wild warmth.
Facebook Link here. Suggested donation: £10 (pay only what you can afford).

7PM: DOORS

8PM: JAN NOBLE PERFORMS POETIC MONOLOGUE 'BODY 115'

"A Dantesque investigation into the identification of the unnamed victim of the Kings Cross fire and the third in a trilogy of journey works (after My Name Is Swan and Reynard) launched at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival."

INTERVAL

9PM: NEW RIVER PRESS PRESENTS A GALA OF DESPERATE HOPE. SHARP MAGNIFICENT INTERVENTIONS FROM:

Jeremy Reed
Kirsten Norrie
Greta Bellamacina
Robert Montgomery
Ana Seferovic
Niall McDevitt
Zia Ahmed
Golnoosh Nour
Kostya Tsolákis
Sophie Naufal
Jamie Lee
Magdalene Forès

11PM-3AM: DJs AND WHIRLING


---- poet biographies ----

Jeremy Reed: "the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world." (BJORK)

Jeremy Reed is one of Britain’s most prolific and transgressive poets. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes like the Somerset Maugham Award, and was on his coming to live in London in the 1980s patronised by the artist Francis Bacon. Some of his most esteemed fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty, and Bjork, who has called his work ‘the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.’ Jeremy writes about every subject that British poetry considers taboo, glamour, pop, rock, sci-fi, cyber, mutant, gay, drugs, neuroscientific, the disaffected and outlawed, and the fizzy big city chemistry of the London in which he lives and creates.

Kirsten Norrie: "Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. " (IAIN SINCLAIR)

Kirsten Norrie writes poetry under her matrilineal name, MacGillivray. She is the author of three poetry collections; The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless, 2016 and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead published by Bloodaxe in 2019 and The Last Wolf of Scotland published by Red Hen in the US, 2013. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and The Verb and her first non-fiction book Scottish Lost Boys, Seven Renegade Essays is published by Strange Attractor/ MIT in Summer, 2019.

Greta Bellamacina: Poetry is a sacred space — you can be a child again.

Greta Bellamacina is a poet, filmmaker, and actress who co-founded New River Press. Andy Warhol's Interview magazine says Greta, “is garnering critical acclaim for her way with words and her ability to translate the classic poetic form into the contemporary creative landscape.” She edited the collection Smear: Poems For Girls. Her Selected Poems 2015-17 has been published in English by New River Press and in Spanish by Valparaíso Ediciones.

Robert Montgomery: The city is wilder and kinder than you think.

Robert Montgomery is a Scottish visual artist and poet who co-founded New River Press. He creates billboard poems, light pieces, fire poems, woodcuts and watercolors. Dane Weatherman in Black & Blue Journal wrote that “to encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light. He is a complete artist and works in language, light, paper, space. He engages completely with the urban world with a translucent poetry.”

Ana Seferovic: Fascinated by the outcast in each and every one of us

Ana Seferovic is a Belgrade born poet and writer. She is interested in the relationship between a system and an individual, especially fascinated by outcasts, but also an outcast in each and every of us, because an outcast is where either system or an individual (or both) are breaking. She was a co-author of radio show and art platform PornoPop, examining sex and body as a battlefield of politics, art, literature and culture in general. She has published 4 poetry collections, she is a co-author of 2 plays and 2 poetry books.

Niall McDevitt: "A luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries." (JEREMY REED)

Niall McDevitt is an Irish poet resident in London, author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He leads psychogeographic ‘wandering lectures’ around London for New River Press exploring the paths of Shakespeare, Blake, Rimbaud, and Yeats. Heathcote Williams described his work as "savagely witty". Babylon (a neoliberal theodicy), which adapts Akkadian-Sumerian texts to critique western globalism, is forthcoming with New River Press.

Zia Ahmed: Musical melancholy from former London Poet Laureate

Zia Ahmed is from North-West London. He is part of the London Laureates, having been shortlisted for London’s Young Poet Laureate 2015/16. He is a former Roundhouse Slam Champion and Writer in Residence at Paines Plough as part of Channel 4’s Playwright Scheme. He is currently part of the Bush Theatre's Emerging Writers Group

Golnoosh Nour: exploring queerness through a postcolonial lens

Golnoosh Nour is a Tehran-born poet and academic born in 1988. Her 2017 debut poetry collection Sorrows of the Sun was published under the pseudonym, Sogol Sur by Skyscraper. She’s performed work at numerous literary events across the UK, including The Shuffle at the Poetry Café, Queer Art for Queer Refugees at SOAS, Birkbeck Poetry Live for Arts Week, Poets Against Oppression, and Tate South Lambeth Library for LGBTQ History Month. Golnoosh has recently completed a practice-based PhD in Literature and Creative Writing, exploring queerness through a postcolonial lens. She teaches both prose and poetry at Birkbeck and The University of East London.

Kostya Tsolákis: the joys and anxieties of Cavafy fantasies

Kostya Tsolákis is a London-based Greek poet, translator and journalist. His poems have appeared in Magma, perverse, Strix, Brittle Star, The Fenland Reed and The New River Press 2019 Anthology. In 2018, his translations of the Greek gay poet Andreas Aggelákis were included in the LGBTQ+ issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘The House of Thirst’. He founded and co-edits harana poetry, an online magazine for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language. He lives locally, on Petherton Road, which marks part of the course of the New River.

Sophie Naufal: dead living never dies

Sophie Naufal is a London based British-Lebanese composer and performer. As a singer-songwriter and guitarist she writes wry, dark, and sharply observed narratives of modern life. She has performed around the U.K. as well as in Portugal, Lebanon, Australia, America and Thailand, where she spent time as the resident musician in a jazz bar. As a composer and producer she has written for theatre, film, and performance pieces.

Jamie Lee: in a McSweeney trance and learning to love

Jamie Lee is a poet based in south London. He is one half of independent publisher Pariah Press which is based between Manchester and London. Poets of interest include Antonin Artaud, Barry McSweeney, Adrienne Rich, Ian Hamilton, John Berryman, Elaine Feinstein and would also recommend Lanark by Alaisdair Gray.

Magdalene Forès: the intricacies of the awkwardness of intimacy

Magdalene Forés is a painter, writer, and singer. Her work explores awkwardness of intimacy and the intricacies of that experience. Her work appears in the 2019 New River Press Yearbook: When They Start To Love You As A Machine You Should Run.