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Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 13 of iamb. wave thirteen spring 2023 Anila Arshad-Mehmood Anna Milan Ben Blench Courtenay Schembri Gray Dale Booton Darren J Beaney Di Slaney Emily Cotterill James McConachie Jude Marr Mary Ford Neal Michael Conley Rachel Deering Sam J Grudgings Stephanie Clare Smith

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 19 of iamb. wave nineteen autumn 2024 Christopher Arksey Corinna Board Frances Boyle Julie Stevens Kerry Darbishire Laura Theis Lewis Wyn Davies Louise Longson Marc Alan Di Martino Michele Grieve Nicholas McGaughey Oormila V Prahlad Rhona Greene Suyin Du Bois Tom Bailey

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 10 of iamb. wave ten summer 2022 Annick Yerem Bill Sutton Elisabeth Kelly Elizabeth M Castillo Emma Kemp Gerry Stewart Jay Whittaker Ken Cockburn Kitty Donnelly Michael McGill Penelope Shuttle Richard Jeffrey Newman Ruth Taaffe Shiksha S Dheda Simon Middleton

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 17 of iamb. wave seventeen spring 2024 Carol J Forrester David Pecotić Eilín de Paor Helen Kay Ilisha Thiru Purcell Iris Anne Lewis Jonathan Humble Lesley Curwen Margaret Dennehy Nina Parmenter Sarah Holland Steve Smart Sue Spiers Thomas McColl Tracey Rhys

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 23 of iamb. wave twenty-three autumn 2025 Barnaby Harsent Claire Orchard Eric T Racher Estelle Price Helen Laycock Hilary Sallick Hilary Watson Karan Chambers Kate Caoimhe Arthur Lysz Flo Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig Michael Burton Piero Toto Sarah Wallis Victoria Spires

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 18 of iamb. wave eighteen summer 2024 A R Williams Deborah Harvey Hilary Menos Isabelle Kenyon Julieanne Larick Liam Bates Mims Sully Nicole Tallman Niki Strange Phillip Crymble Rachel Carney Sinéad Griffin Thomas Zimmerman Warrick Wynne Yvonne Marjot

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 21 of iamb. wave twenty-one spring 2025 Andrea Small Bob Perkins Fred Schmalz Gillian Craig Jane Robinson Joe Williams Kelly Davis Maggie Mackay Marie Little Mark Carson Moira Walsh Perry Gasteiger Robin Helweg-Larsen S Reeson Theresa Donnelly

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 8 of iamb. wave eight winter 2021 Beth Brooke Catrice Greer Cora Dessalines Fiona Sampson Hilary Otto JC Niala Leeanne Quinn Lucy Holme Marcelle Newbold Natalie Crick Oliver Comins Peter Scalpello Robert Harper Suchi Govindarajan Zoe Brooks

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 14 of iamb. wave fourteen summer 2023 Alice Stainer Aysegul Yildirim Dave Garbutt Deborah Finding Devjani Bodepudi Ed Garvey Long Hannah Linden Ian McMillan J L M Morton Jamie Woods Jerm Curtin May Chong Ramona Herdman Valerie Bence Victoria Punch

wave sixteen winter 2023 Alan Buckley Conor Kelly

Hear poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura back next the poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a poet, painter, and cartoonist whose poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal , Poet Lore , DMQ Review , Tule Review , Louisiana Literature , The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. With Ubasute , he won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. the poems Family Anthem 00:00 / 01:11 I walk into the garage from side door sunlight ELO on my Walkman my eyes dissolve the darkness to discover my parents locked in a slow-dance embrace whispering to each other like lovers but my parents aren’t lovers they’re Japanese never kiss hold hands say I love you not even to me once I asked Mom if she loved me she replied my mother and father never said it but I knew they did my parents hear my shuffle separate like guilty teenagers she escapes into the house he into the Ford opens the garage door I fumble forget what I was looking for but all afternoon replay that dissonant chord What’s Kept Alive 00:00 / 01:27 She crunches her walker into the sea of pebbles surrounding the stepping-stones, tells me, This bush with flowers is Japanese. That one is too, but different. I hover close behind, ready with an outstretched arm as if to give a blessing. Pick that large weed near the lantern — by the roots — and throw it into the pail. My father planned and planted this garden fifty years ago— hidden behind the fence of their Santa Rosa tract home— but he’s gone now. She hires a hand to rake leaves, prune branches once a month. Soon she’ll be gone. I’ll sell the house, return to Connecticut. A stranger will buy it, become caretaker of the garden, but won’t know that from their San Francisco apartment my father transported the Japanese maple, cradled in a small clay pot — the momiji now guarding the north corner— and that my mother chided him for bothering with a dying shrub. The Hardest Part 00:00 / 01:50 The fire truck siren downstairs raided the air of my mother's dreams. She'd scream in her sleep , my father told me, even after we married. More than a decade past the Second World War — for him, American concentration camps, for her, the firebombing of Tokyo — they moved into a San Francisco apartment that rented to Japs, a one-bedroom walk-up above the Post Street fire station. They painted their bathroom black — It was in style then— shelved books, unboxed a new rice cooker, watered a shrub of Japanese maple potted for their future garden. When the station got a call in the middle of the night, the rumble of the overhead door crumbled into the wreck that was once her home. Swirling lights flashed ancient trees into flames through the thin silk curtains of her eyelids. No warning, no drill, no cover. My father stilled her body, his broad hand on her shoulder or hip as they lay in the dark listening to the slowing of her breath. The hardest part of those nights , he said, was waiting— sometimes hours—for the truck and the men to come back. Publishing credits Family Anthem: DMQ Review What’s Kept Alive / The Hardest Part: Hartford Courant

Hear poet Hilary Sallick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hilary Sallick back next the poet Vice-president of the New England Poetry Club from 2016 to 2024, Hilary Sallick is a teacher with a long-time focus on adult literacy. She's the author of Love is a Shore – long-listed for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards – and Asking the Form . Her poems have appeared in Action , Spectacle , Halfway Down the Stairs , Permafrost , Potomac Review , Notre Dame Review and elsewhere. Hilary lives in Somerville, MA. the poems rough edges 00:00 / 02:34 rainy I got up and went outside before my coffee before this long work in which time vanishes I walked in the drizzle not far down Elm and back along the park crossing the field the ground soft beneath my feet and remembering the little kids the games of catch with Will and pushing Verna on the swing then I hurried home poured my coffee and came to sit by these windows I don’t like to let go of old efforts because I feel those same desires unfinished passing me and I think about that a lot there are pearls of rain on the mulberry beads of light in the rain there’s the murmur and tapping of droplets on the house I opened an old document scrolled slowly through its digital pages remembering how bit by bit I made edits and changes now the version before me seems stripped of grace or whatever meaning the original once hoped for as if an essence has been polished away I think I’m going about this all wrong and here I am still doing it a squirrel in the mulberry is climbing nosing seeking nutritious bits to gnaw on those long awkward and winding branches how good the rough bark must feel to its feet reliable interesting I still want everything a hundred per cent as Eileen Myles says in a poem by that name a crack of light a step an ocean and the day is about to disappear I have my students’ notebooks too beside me hand-scrawled urgent or tidy they like me to read their works and write back to them how would it be if someone wrote back to me I sort of do that for myself to the extent possible and there is no risk involved no danger of being intruded upon or hurt but what’s the point then So soft our hearts 00:00 / 00:31 So soft our hearts— how to keep the softness the give the resilience when to be hard-hearted seems solution or result what one should do what one cannot help doing (then pain when the hardness cuts) The body’s made of softness with gentleness carries us Parting 00:00 / 03:59 Because of my heavy suitcase and my tote bag loaded with poetry we decide as we walk through the dark-red door of her apartment to take the elevator down; wafts of feeling like air through a window surging through me as my daughter closes her door behind us locks secure her world its views that look without and within meaning a few bright windows that orange wall beneath a stripe of sky and those paintings she’s made and is making Too feminine she worries because of palette and curve that draw the eye showing how things fold into themselves making new pathways in secret there in the studio where nothing is ever exactly as dreamed yet continues so a dream too is behind the door now the dream I imagine and carry in memory as we push the button for the elevator wait for the sound of its rising or descending as every day through decades bearing families with children in strollers tenants with laundry with groceries with musical instruments furniture languages; clanking softly it nears we hear its door shuffle open pull the landing door to enter and there’s a man before us bent motionless over his walker and for the briefest moment his implacable eye meets ours until he inches back politely we slip past him into the elevator’s box feel the downward motion the machine’s joints creaking four floors to the bottom where the landing door won’t budge my daughter pushes hard but we’re enclosed a long instant then rising again to the second floor where the doors open freely so down we go once more oh quiet man oh gentle lovely daughter oh self of each of us contained within silence curtained by courtesy; no luck we go back up we’ll have to take the stairs do you need help she asks him as we emerge to the second floor almost a murmur her tone and at his barely vocalized assent she lifts the walker carries it lightly down the fifteen steps then returns and offers her arm; they’re not quite strangers they’ve nodded in passing before now they’re descending each worn tiled stair in slowest motion I follow the pair of them Take your time she says in a low voice when he needs to rest and eventually here we are on the first floor we part from him step out to cool spring the few small trees beginning to leaf a softness of color against the brick and concrete and how will I do us justice in memory in poetry; it’s late much later than I’d meant to leave I’ve seen him waiting before she tells me someone is coming and we walk up the hill together she’s giving me directions for the subway we’re hurrying hurrying though my train will turn out to be delayed Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Stewart Carswell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Stewart Carswell back next the poet Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, where he co-pilots the Fen Speak open mic night. He studied Physics at Southampton University, and has a PhD from the University of Bristol. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar , Envoi , Ink Sweat & Tears , and The Fenland Reed . His debut collection, forthcoming in 2021, is Earthworks . the poems Earthworks West Kennett 00:00 / 00:34 I migrate back to this farmland burdened for summer with corn, where the mound distorts the harvest and the great stones form the façade of a house that swallows the dead and has for centuries. On a ledge inside the entrance a line of faces stares down at me, their flesh behind glossy feathers, and guarding its nest is the swallow, inverting the tomb into a cradle, raising five lives from this chamber. Listen to this 00:00 / 00:26 The river is fed by brooks that pour sound down the hillside. A season of rain fattens it. The level has risen higher than I expected, but it is level still and that is important: to stay balanced no matter how much rain has fallen, no matter how much you want to flow with that water away from this place. Sleepers 00:00 / 01:45 A curtain of ferns spreads at eye height to a child and parts from the push of a hand to expose the shrinking clearing and the treasure at its centre: an ancient sleeper laying like a sunken casket and shrouded by a puzzle of oak leaves. The specimen ornamented with metalware: rusted plates and bolts, brooches carried by the dead to the next station of life. Close the curtains. Change the scene. A figure stands at the end of the platform, his face masked by a flag. Steam spirals around him, a spire above rows of sleepers. There is one line drawn from childhood through junctions to connections, and the destination is close to definition. I feel the platform vibrate from something about to begin. The figure sounds his whistle. His flag drops and it is my face unmasked and it's time to leave this dream and I see it now. The trackbed has lost its track and I have lost track of time. I get up to check my phone but there’s no signal and my daughter is asleep, habitually dreaming of a better life to travel in and I see it now. The ancient sleeper is a relic, an inherited burden, second-hand history. I step outside, and the first engine of the day sets out light, and I see it now: I know what to do. Publishing credits Earthworks: Ink, Sweat & Tears Listen to this: Eighty Four – Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope (Verve Poetry Press) Sleepers: Elsewhere

Hear poet Estelle Price read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Estelle Price back next the poet From lawyer to classicist to charity worker to poet, Estelle Price won the 2025 Kipling Society's John McGivering Writing Competition , 2024 SaveAsWriters Group International Writing Competition (Poetry) , 2024 Passionfruit Poetry Prize , 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award and 2023 Welshpool Open Poetry Competition . Her poetry has been long-listed three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition, and placed or listed in several other prestigious competitions. Often writing from a feminist perspective on her East End past, Estelle has had poems in The Honest Ulsterman , bath magg , The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Featured in Nine Arches Press' Primers 6 , she's working on her debut collection. the poems Blessings ‘It would be infinitely lonely to live in a world without blessing.’ ~ John O’Donohue ~ 00:00 / 02:22 Bless the fox that tears into your bins and scatters your shame in the street. This is not the worst that can happen. Bless the red at the corner of the sky where there is a rip. You are part of it. Bless the blood that wells into the phial to be sent for analysis. Bless your stooped father when you leave him, like a grieving swan, on his doorstep. He needs guarding. Bless the baby you miscarried and the mystery of where she is. Bless the hands that picked the apple you are eating. Somewhere those hands seek rest. Bless the Earth and the voices that sing her anthems in your cities. They are the planet’s prophets. Bless the man you divorced. Bless the man you married after. Both have gardens in your heart. Bless the cupboard you hide in when memory wears laddered stockings. Bless hope when she navigates your mind’s black canals and places her fingers on the lock-gates. One day you will open. Bless the new-born river when it trickles into the light. You are that river. Bless the man in the tweed jacket who delicately lied to you. He is a house by the ocean whose walls are cracking. Bless the stranger in the red coat who jostled you in the grocers. She is the woman you were when your mother died. Bless the boy driving too loud in his souped-up car on the bypass. He is your faraway son. Bless the moments that surge like waves drowning the shore you love best. You are an oyster shell above the high tide mark. Bless the woman you still can be, who waits in your life’s long grass for you to grip her hands and dance. her wrist 00:00 / 01:35 slender like a stick of bamboo. its bone an unexpected table-top balanced on a bed of wrinkles that crease and crinkle like a plate of over-cooked spaghetti. the skin thirsty. its texture roughed by eighty summers to the colour of toffee. freckles grown bold and sassy speckle her forearm where once a bracelet of daisies linked arms and danced a joy-jig until dawn. at the base of her thumb, a scar, napkin white, the pigment burnt lifting a feast from the oven. lean in touch can you feel the demands of steel cuffing her to a fence when the world wobbled on its nuclear tight rope? today she’s watch-less. it’s time to give up on earth’s beating drum. take a moment you don’t have long. rotate. be gentle this wrist is porcelain-frail. there you’ve found her shy-side split in two by a wand of blood. take your chance place a kiss where once a pulse purposed. cut through the hospital tag set free a prayer for your mother as her life softens to memory. Diva 00:00 / 02:17 Let the red curtain go up on the stage at Covent Garden and let it be you, Nan, skipping into silver footlights an audience of toffs in black ties and glitzy frocks clapping, conductor, down in the pit, his baton raised (but not for hitting). Let it be you whose ruby lips trill a Mozart aria who flings fear, like a cadenza into corners of the auditorium out-of-reach of echo. You, who bellowed from a stall down Petticoat Lane, flogging cast-offs from Chelsea. You who stood in factory-rain, a black-sequinned dress dangled off smoky fingers, telling the girl, who turned her perm away, to ‘try it on luv, it’ll fit like a glove, luv’ . Cos if it’s you, Nan, you can choose to be Mimi, Tosca, even Queen of the Night. but please don’t pick Carmen, I can’t watch you stabbed by a soldier or a husband who chases you down the stairs with a knife. Let it be bouquets of freesias, not punches, that fall round your frizzy hair. I can hear you yelling to stop ‘avin a larf but it’ll be fun Nan Trust me. I’ve got an Oxford degree. I know how to get creases out of consonants, how to bleach vowels. Your vibrato will be adored from Rome to Milan. No more whelks in Southend, no more whispers on the pier with your sisters, no more sharing a dodgem with Harry and his docker-fists. Even the King will love you (at least for a season or two). And in the end Nan, instead of wheeling the stall back to the lockup as if it were a pram full of ten children instead of Saturday nights at the bingo, I promise you’ll fly out the window (like I did) head west (goodbye Plaistow!) wearing the black-sequined dress – cos surely you must want to? Publishing credits Blessings: Ten Poems from Welshpool (Candlestick Press) Won first prize in the Welshpool Poetry Competition 2023 her wrist: Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize Pamphlet 2017 (Highly Commended poem) Diva: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Karan Chambers read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Karan Chambers back next the poet Poet, tutor and former English teacher Karan Chambers (she/her) has just completed the first year of a Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway. Highly Commended in the 2023 Cheltenham Poetry Festival International Poetry Prize , she's had work in The London Magazine , The Honest Ulsterman , Gutter , Anthropocene , Butcher’s Dog , Mslexia , Propel Magazine , Under the Radar , 14 Magazine and Ink, Sweat & Tears . Her pamphlet woman | folk appeared in February 2025, and her second pamphlet with Atomic Bohemian is due in 2026. Karan lives in Surrey with her husband, three lively children, and a long-suffering cat. the poems hebridean spring 00:00 / 01:20 here is land like an upturned fist. darkknuckled. jutting. awkward angles & uncanny places. a stretch. rock & shingle. skerrystruck. between jawopen seas. here are its quiet hollows. its openreach heights. its spiked invitation. here is the gorse. furzespine prickle. brindlecoated. here is the heather. a restless unfolding. lingslung fire. smoulder & tongueflicker. here is a melody. scattering its way through the leaves. softkeyed promise. fertile ground sings to fallow. here are the women. working. & tending. & growing. & raising the bairns. & dreaming of more. here are the men at sea. except when they’re not. except when they’re shadowstood. landlooming. claiming what’s theirs. it’s fine if you’re willing. want makes flames of us all. but what if you’re not? what if your body can’t bear another. we’ve all seen his hands round her ankles. seen submersion in her eyes. i know how a woman drowns google tells me that summer 2023 is the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2000 years 00:00 / 01:14 fish are dying from shropshire to sussex across the channel the loire has almost completely evaporated silver scales gasp in shrinking waters here reservoirs run dry gardens crumple under heavy heat & blackberries shrivel on hedges before we can stain t-shirts lips little grabbing hands purple clusters hanging parched listless i do my best to conserve resources turn taps off while soaping hands & brushing teeth take short showers clothes crack with dirt & sweat before i wash them my mind is air above hot asphalt shimmering late into the night i wonder what next summer & the ones after will bring how much difference can i make i’d like to believe but it all feels so futile a few weeks later the weather breaks & we dance in the muggy evening skin sweating even as rain slicks pavements i feel relief but then watch the news chest tightening as what seems like half a continent is washed away woman: drowned 00:00 / 00:28 silt-tongued, stonepocketed, her body a riverbed eroding its banks. surfacing with pondweed hair, she is pearleyed, staring, a glossy reflection want untethered. the drift of mouth of cheekbones seawards, lips & lashes currentstricken spurred into confluence a warning for all those who never learned to swim Publishing credits hebridean spring: Anthropocene google tells me that summer 2023 is the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2000 years: exclusive first publication by iamb woman: drowned: woman | folk (Salò Press) Author photo: © Paula Deegan