Welcome to the Chainlink Magazine Archive Chainlink Magazine ran from May to December 2025 and was an attempt by Neil Fulwood and Shaun Belcher to do something different in poetry magazine terms….
Category: POLITICS
DEEP ART: A Q&A WITH ANTHONY HOWELL
CHAINLINK: On the spine of your book-length poem Autumn, where the publisher’s name and/or logo would usually be, it says “Manubook”, which I take to mean a manuscript presented bound and with…
REVIEW: Autumn by Anthony Howell (Manubook) – Neil Fulwood
It would be erroneous – and stupid – to say that cracking the spine on Anthony Howell’s Autumn is as daunting as settling down (or, equally, squaring up) to The Odyssey or…
ANDY CROFT’S ESCAPE TO MORIBUNDIA: AN EXCERPT
Forthcoming from Broken Sleep in 2027, Andy Croft’s Escape to Moribundia is a verse-novel in Pushkin sonnets. A black comedy about the colonisation of the Future, a study in Hauntology and a…
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…
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…
TESTIMONIES FROM GAZA: Two new books on Gaza reviewed by Neil Fulwood
We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey (Hutchinson Heinemann) Who Will Tell My Story? – A Gaza Diary by Anonymous (Guardian Faber) The genesis…
Brett Evans: Three Poems
Argument for Devolved Media in Cymru And we finish our tour of Conwy Castlein the Cunt’s Tower; here’s Rod Liddletied to a chair. That bloodied rag now gagsa toothless mouth and broken…
Edward Mackinnon: Five Poems
ON BEING A FATHER IN GAZA The hospital doctor told memy son had a slight chance of survival.When I went back I couldn’t findmy son,the doctoror the hospital. THE WRITING ON THE…
THE HOUSES OF VLADIMIR: Poem by Anthony Owen
THE HOUSES OF VLADIMIR Nothing weighs more thana child’s body limp as flagsof blue sky and wheat. Nothing deafens morethan mothers ululatinggrief that scatters birds. This permanent rainof worldly things turned hellish…
TRUMP’S BIRTHDAY SURPRISE: Two poems by Shaun Belcher
Trump’s Birthday Party Surprise In Minnesota a right-wing evangelistDressed as a Marlboro County Cowboythen as a policeman knocked the door And fired multiple shots through it at two lawmakersand a Spinal bifida…
POEMS VS THE CURSE OF TRUMPERY: Four poems by Graham Lock
Liar! Liar!with sincere apologies to William Blake Liar! Liar! orange bright,beacon for the ultra right.What immodest boast or liecould TRUMP your own mendacity? On what distant golf-course greendid you learn to strut…
Graham Lock: Three Poems on Gaza
Shylock and Portia Address Benjamin Netanyahu Shylock: Hath not a Gazan eyes? Hath not a Gazan hands, organs, senses, passions? Are they not subject to typhoid, hunger and despair? If you bomb…
Ruth Hobson: Three Poems
The King is Dead In 1536, a woman imagining the death of a kingwas to be drawn on a hurdle to the pyreand burned alive. Well, I don’t want him to die,…
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: Poems translated by Hongwei Bao
Translator’s note:All the poems are translated from Chinese into English with Mu Cao’s permission. I have chosen to use small case to translate all of Mu Cao’s poems because Chinese characters do…
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…
Gregory Woods – Three Poems
HOLDING STILL You imagine me standing at the windowwatching the fireworks above the harbourYou imagine me choking back the tears and the cocaineheartrate uncommonly highspirits expectedly lowYou imagine me burning your lettersand…
REVIEW: Release the Sausages! edited by Andy Croft (Culture Matters) – Neil Fulwood
There is a technique in poetry, borrowed from Apophatic Theology, called the via negativa, whereby attention is drawn to the subject by dint of its absence. This new anthology, subtitled Poems for…
The Greenwash Recycle – Shaun Belcher
THE GREENWASH RECYCLE Starts in a marketing agency hand-out around the milleniumSocial demarcation and quantifying statistics showed newer markets More social class segmentation and new science of social media metricsIdentified new opportunities…