LEAFE PRESS Leafe Press publishes poetry, mainly of the modernist / post-modernist variety. It’s a 21st century press and a digital press; it was founded in April 2000 with a launch at…
Category: ESSAYS
HALF A CENTURY AGO … Ross Bradshaw
Fifty years is a long time in politics… and it was fifty years ago that four young anti-militarists in Aberdeen were arrested under the arcane charge of Incitement to Disaffection. I was…
ALAN MORRISON ON THE ALDERBANK WADE
(Adapted from the Preface to The Alderbank Wade) I first developed a fascination with the political and religious nuances surrounding the English Civil War, or as it is termed in Marxian historicism, the English Revolution, and…
ME AND ARTHUR SEATON: A PERSONAL ODYSSEY THROUGH SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING: Neil Fulwood
There had been working class novels before. But they’d generally been written by middle class authors slumming it for the sake of material. When Alan Sillitoe burst onto the literary scene in…
THE ARMITAGE STOMP (Revisited)
This post originally brought together some thoughts I posted online in response to the attention being given a negative review posted on the Stride website by poet and critic Martin Stannard of…
Benjamin Zephaniah, Sitting Bull and a Sleepy Nation – Andy Croft
Effective oppositional spaces are rapidly disappearing. Democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. Constitutional and legal constraints on power, within and between nation states have no…
Mu Cao: Dark Chronicler of China’s Working-Class Queer Life – Hongwei Bao
For more than two decades, working-class queer Chinese Mu Cao 墓草 (b.1974, Henan, China) has been a unique voice in Chinese literature and global queer literature. Often referred to as a ‘folk…
A SUMMER CASE OF CULTURAL IRRELEVANCE : THE TLS – Nick Ingram
A SUMMER CASE OF CULTURAL IRRELEVANCE – The Tls – Nick Ingram
Writing Home: Arnold Bennett, Stoke and Me – Jonathan Taylor
Jonathan Taylor “No-one ever comes to Stoke, no-one ever leaves Stoke, except for Arnold Bennett, and even he had to write about it”: when I was growing up in Stoke-on-Trent (aka the…
David Graeber (1961-2020) – Andy Hedgecock
Andy Hedgecock writes an appreciation of the works of David Graeber (1961-2020). A dissident writer who in Utopia of Rules tackles the factors that lead us to create and sustain rule-based systems and – in turn – considers the tendency of those systems to determine the way we use our tools and technologies.
The hedgehog and the goose – Shaun Belcher
ECOLOGICAL THEMES IN THE POETRY OF ALASDAIR MACLEAN AND WILLIAM NEILL. “At heart no flyer, I bristle timidly when touched. When the ice comes I retreat beneath it. I choose at last…