Next reading is 2 May 2023 – Martin Stannard & Jo Dixon 

’27 Poems’ is what it says on the tin: 27 short poems – twelve and a half lines each, to be exact – which does and doesn’t practice what’s suggested in one of the poems:                                  

  . . . . we had roast
  chicken, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts
  for dinner and it was very delightful. For
  pudding we had banana and custard and really
  I don’t know why more people don’t write
  more poems about these kinds of things.
  If you want more people to read more poems
  you should write more poems about this stuff.
  I would read them.

Published in February 2023 by Red Ceilings in a limited edition of 50 numbered copies.

Red Ceilings is here.

Jo Dixon

Jo Dixon is a poet, critic and academic living in Nottingham. She was born in Stepney and spent her childhood in Colchester. Her poems appear in a range of publications, including New WalkThe Interpreter’s HouseFuries (For Books’ Sake), In Transit (The Emma Press, 2018) and South Bank Poetry. Her debut poetry pamphlet, A Woman in the Queue, was published by Melos Press in 2016. An article on the poetry of Alice Oswald can be found at C21: Journal of 21st Century Writings. Her poem ‘Skegness Wake’ is included in Poems of Place: Mapping the Nation in Verse, edited by Andrew McRae and introduced by Paul Farley (London: Oneworld Publications, forthcoming Autumn 2020).

Jo reads her poetry across the East Midlands and in 2018 she visited Estonia to read at the Crazy Tartu Festival. She has worked on community poetry projects with Bilborough Sixth Form College, Nottingham Contemporary, St. Ann’s Allotments and UNESCO Cities of Literature in Poland, Estonia, Ireland and the UK. Her most recent commission is a poem written for the 50th anniversary of the twinning of Nottingham (UK) and Karlshruhe (Germany). Currently, she works as a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester.