PLU Gazette - Winter Edition 2024
Editors’ Note
One of the primary purposes of Paris Lit Up is to provide a space for its artistic community to express itself. With the PLU Gazette, PLU’s new quarterly online publication, we hope to be able to do just that. We have the honour and the privilege of acting as the editing team on this, its first edition. However, we hope that it’ll be much more than just a place for creative self-expression. We live in a world beset by many ills, the ever-worsening situation in the Middle East, the ‘stagnating’ war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, to name but a few, and there are also more personal issues, loneliness, isolation, grief, depression. Poetry can act as a refuge in times like these, a refuge from the horrors and the hardships of life, and more than that, a place to process, understand and come to terms with them. With this first edition of the PLU Gazette, we want to welcome you into this refuge, to hold out a hand, to pull you in, so that you can come in and sit with us beside the hearth, to offer shelter from the storm that rages in the streets outside. It will not always be easy, sometimes it might even be devastating, but just know that through all of this, poetry remains.
Sebastian Cray & Claire Durand-Gasselin, Winter Editors
Table of contents
Refuge by Christian Yeo
Late Stage by Brian Sheffield
Boulevard Davout by Audrey Vinkenes
Rearrangement by Sandra Arnold
Cabernet by James Croal Jackson
FLATTENED A FOX by Marius Presterud
First Frost by Erin Jamieson
1934: The Children’s Hour by DC Diamondopolous
the issue with falling in love by Lola Krivosic
i have forgotten how numbers work by Josh Cake
Until Show’s End by Beth Keehn
A Wall In Crete - Paleokastro heat by George Vance
Sometimes We Write Poems During The War by Eva Charidas
(N.B. if reading on your phone, we recommend holding it horizontally to read this piece to avoid distortion to the form of certain poetry pieces)
Refuge
by Christian Yeo
Say we met at the border,
where a man hides behind a bus
like a street cat with a bin.
Say we caught him. Say we
burned his clothes
by the mountains and the sea.
Say we broke each other
relentlessly. Say we
lay under a truck for hours,
say we earned seven years in a tent.
Tents like these make no
difference. Difference
is what we encounter
at the tree where apathies meet.
I want more than this sorrow.
I am dissatisfied with the
life we have borrowed.
Say we sat under the tree
and watched the torchlights
sweep the streets of Bethlehem.
Say we wept again. Say we
didn’t stop weeping,
this game of trying
to grieve our friends.
Late Stage
by Brian Sheffield
i.
I am naked beneath the oak tree
vulgar as the Origin of the World.
I turn toward the spread genitals of the rose
and pollinate the air with my red stench.
I am the horsefly fucking on the marble counter.
I am the doe, feeding my young on the noonday street.
I am the dead laid splayed,
a bleeding orgy of concrete and dust.
I will feed the fatted worm. My feeding
will person the pulpit, flame the sword.
I sit between the always was and is.
My dinner is a long con.
Sworn to violence, my dripping maw
eats four billion years. Wheels
above me grind, creation quakes,
and an audacity of nations lurches.
A helicopter’s drum disrupts the sunset.
An unidentified bird sings lustfully
against silence and the putrescine heat.
ii.
We talked for two hours about the end
of the world. Milosz saw bees and a drunk,
but you feared a growing fire in the south, kept
singing heat wave’s been freaking me out;
said, walls sit like a disembodied ribcage:
they climb upwards towards nothing.
Even if heaven's vaulted ghosts
could clamor over all those whittled bones,
the caged desert would still be a quenchless thirst.
No spring was meant to be this warm
as if metal, blood, and stone could listen.
iii.
I know that there will always be
a changing of the old cogs. The cold
and careless sea will swallow all power,
grow hot for a moment, and make
of its neo-primordial soup a new beast.
Pray its thoughts are empty as the sleeping calf's.
Quietude may smile when the sudden breeze
deceives the air, lifts an infinitude of dust, and
dresses the low sky in its colorless affair.
Boulevard Davout
by Audrey Vinkenes
stale metro air madame? madame?
cigarette? marlboro? marlboro?
i can still smell your soap on my skin
mettez fin à vos problèmes de nuisibles
neon amber
vérification “gratuite” de ta vue
old oranges and fresh pomegranates tumble
onto the sidewalk primeur davout
do I have to go back there?
attention à la fermeture des portes
it’s getting close to dusk
the rotisserie chickens spinning faster and faster
i’ll be heading home soon
you’ll be here still
emmaüs a wedding dress
the CGT windows glowing in the sun
pastèque? pastèque?
couscous brochette
telecom lyca mobile
the metro takes me away instead
with nothing left at home but
a slice of ham
two slices of zucchini
silence
en fait
waiting for tomorrow
Rearrangement
by Sandra Arnold
First, the fridge switched itself off and mounds of sludge poured out the door into a decaying heap on the floor. Then the clock stopped ticking and Poppy couldn’t find the key to wind it up again. When the switches refused to turn on any lights and the house stayed dark, Poppy had an overwhelming need to sleep.
When she finally got out of bed, after so many days ‒ or was it weeks? ‒ she looked in the mirror and decided some changes were needed. She showered. Popped in her new teeth. She arranged the wig to cover her stringy hair, adjusted the blue lenses over her cloudy eyes, pasted on the false eyelashes and the fake lips. She stuck the long silver nails at the end of her fingers, fastened the push-up bra with wire reinforcement, and yanked the corset to nip in her waist. Then she slithered into the red silk dress and black high heels, took a step back and twirled in front of the mirror. She snapped a selfie and posted it on Facebook.
After giving herself twenty-four hours to count the likes and read the comments, she removed all her adornments, wrapped herself in a warm blanket and limped out into her overgrown garden. She found the hollow tree, climbed in and drifted off to sleep wondering how much gossip would be generated when her friends and neighbours discovered she was missing. Would they call the police? Her family? She drifted further back, picturing her once beautiful garden, feeling her pride in it, her joy in her children playing hide and seek. She remembered the sound of their laughter bouncing from tree to tree; and the disappearance of her youngest who’d undoubtedly thought it a huge joke to slide to the bottom of a hollow tree so the others wouldn’t find him.
Waking to the song of a lone blackbird, she realised she’d lost track of how long she’d been sleeping. She strained her ears to listen for the ringing of the phone on her desk in the house, the rapping of the brass knocker shaped like a lion on her front door, the shrilling of the doorbell, a police siren, screeching brakes outside her gate, the clatter of footsteps on her driveway, the consternation in the voices of friends and neighbours, calling and calling her name.
But there was only silence.
Cabernet
by James Croal Jackson
you set bottles at the foot of the staircase
and sing arrows I hum along to throat
closed this world with you I refuse to
enter I reuse the bottles magenta-stained cork
screwed for promise of filling though what does
when I load your trunk you say you are going
to Colorado to compose for your brother
double yellow line fifteen hundred
miles away we are sweating placing
all the lonely instruments inside their cages
FLATTENED A FOX
by Marius Presterud
FLATTENED A FOX
With my electric car
Weight of the world
First Frost
by Erin Jamieson
There’s a moment before you wake
when the streets transform
into something ethereal
snow dusts but never
collects, just an inkling
of the magical period
of loss and finding
of dormant homes
and growing lives
a cycle
that repeats
more quickly
the older
you are.
1934: The Children’s Hour
by DC Diamondopolous
1934
The New York winter chill disappeared when Jean entered the lobby of Maxine Elliott’s Theater, crowded with women. It was Jean’s fourth matinee since November 20th, when The Children’s Hour premiered.
She hadn’t returned for the play, but for the largely female audience, and more to the heart, for the maddening crush she had on one usherette who seated her in the second balcony.
In the last few years, Jean had scoured through journals on sexuality in the public library. Doctors called her condition inverted, depraved, a mistake of nature. Was it any wonder Martha killed herself at the end of The Children’s Hour?
Jean escaped into books, museums, theaters, and music recitals. For a few hours, the stranglehold of her homosexuality vanished into a novel by Pearl Buck, a painting by Matisse, a musical by Cole Porter, or a recital of Gershwin.
When she accepted what doctors described as a perversion, Jean abandoned all her friends and moved from her parents’ home.
The suffocating fear of being found out grew more intense each year. She suffered headaches in her teens and now stomach problems in her twenties.
So with shocking delight Jean found herself in a Broadway theater surrounded by women. She guessed the majority were lesbian. She saw mannish women in fedoras with violets pinned to the lapels of their suits; feminine women with the purple flower attached to their wide fur collared coats, their hats shaded over one eye like Greta Garbo. Under the crystal chandeliers, Jean gloried in the freedom of knowing there were others like herself.
Yet sitting through the play became torture. Didn’t Lillian Hellman understand the effect Martha’s suicide would have? Killing herself because she was homosexual? What irony, that the play brought out lesbians to meet, mingle, and flirt.
On her secretary’s salary, Jean could only afford afternoons in the top gallery. Today would be her last matinee. Her father had lost his job, like so many other men. Any additional money, she’d give to her parents.
To her right, the winding staircase led to the balconies and to her electrifying encounters with the girl whose name tag said “Rebecca.” With a dash of exotic, perhaps she was Jewish or Italian.
When they first locked eyes, Jean had what one journal called “homosexual recognition,” a knowing that was inherent in the third sex.
On Jean’s second visit to the theater, did she really see the flush of the girl’s cheeks when they glanced at one another? Or the sensuous curve of her lips that followed? When Rebecca took Jean’s ticket, their fingers touched, sending sparks through Jean’s body. She had never felt so alive. As the lights dimmed and Rebecca waited for the arrival of latecomers, Jean imagined unbuttoning Rebecca’s jacket stretched tantalizingly across her breasts.
On Jean’s third matinee, she pinned a violet to her brown coat—a daring act for her. Rebecca greeted her at the top of the stairs. Jean saw her eyes move to the violet. Rebecca smiled. “What’s your name?” Rebecca asked.
“Jean. I’ll be here next week. Maybe afterwards we—”
“Young lady, I can’t find my seat,” interrupted an elderly woman.
Rebecca glanced at Jean and nodded.
That night, Jean fantasized unzipping Rebecca’s dress, of slipping it down over curvaceous hips, of Rebecca lying naked in her bed, of pleasing the girl into ecstasy, of whispers and laughter, going on picnics, drinking champagne, and sharing sunrises over Manhattan. Jean felt a torrent of sexuality sweep through her being. How could such an exquisite feeling be wrong? Who did it hurt?
For this, her final visit, Jean slipped on her favorite coat, the sporty navy wrap with a cinched belt and a faux-fur collar. Over her light-brown hair, she wore a matching blue beret. She applied rouge and lipstick to add color to her fair skin. Jean even curled her hair. She readied herself as if going before the MGM cameras.
For the last three weeks, Rebecca ruled her world. Jean looked anxiously at the staircase to the balconies. She couldn’t wait to see her but hated to once again endure the gunshot at the end of the play.
After taking the first couple of steps, Jean turned and relished all the women in the lobby— their dynamic sexual energy, the flirting, the sideway glances, a light caress that lingered down an arm, a bond invisible to heterosexuals. It was a delicious secret, an affront to those who wished her kind dead.
When Jean arrived on the landing that led to the first balcony, the lights flickered for people to take their seats. She hurried up the staircase. On arriving at the second landing, she drew her ticket from her pocket. At the curtain, leading into the gallery, Jean saw a new usherette. “Where’s Rebecca?” she asked.
“She has the day off. Can I take your ticket?”
“I know where to sit,” she said too sharply.
Slumping in her seat, Jean tried to compose herself from the shattering truth that she’d always be alone. She had been certain Rebecca would be there. Jean twisted the sterling ring on her finger, a gift from her mother for high school graduation. She dug through her purse for tissues as tears streamed down her face.
The lights dimmed.
Jean dabbed her eyes.
A girl in a red coat and slouch hat walked down the aisle. Taking the empty seat next to Jean, she smelled of jasmine and rose.
The girl leaned against her.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Rebecca said.
“You’re here!”
“Shh,” said a voice behind them.
Jean couldn’t contain her joy and pressed her knee against Rebecca’s thigh. “You must really like the play,” Rebecca murmured, rubbing up against Jean’s shoulder. “I don’t like it at all,” Jean said.
“Neither do I,” Rebecca giggled.
“Be quiet,” a woman admonished.
“Want to leave?” Jean asked in a low voice.
Rebecca’s lips brushed her ear as she whispered, “I know a really good kosher deli down the street.”
the issue with falling in love
by Lola Krivosic
-is it makes you consider that maybe you'd feel a whole lot more human if you weren't
in pain all the time.
there's
shrapnel of passing-minutes interlaced in your hands & if they touch me, i think we'll explode;
but
the sun is rising on your face which highlights your smirk - your
smirk!
-you're the only person in the world who could smirk at a time like this, i think
and that makes me hate you and then love you even more.
so, i try to make sense of things, because
that's what i'm best at, isn't it?
isn't it?
& the sense i make of it is that there's the entire history of everyone who has ever held
anyone encapsulated between your
forefinger and your thumb and i
do not know
how to hold it myself, without scaring it away.
& the sense i make of that is that the issue with falling in love is it's all the different versions
of me trying to build some affliction-tower of babel
-none of which are able to look you in the eyes without it collapsing- & they
collectively feel so alive with you i think they might just die from it!
so the sense i make of that is my fingers drinking meaning from your face, trying
to draft a language which sews up and sees all the lost bits of me
- the beginning, the end, yes, especially the end perhaps only the different iterations of the end-
to trace the story, the language, as it emerges from sleep, of some sort of
prometheus
and by that i mean that the issue with falling in love is offering warmth to the parts of yourself
which wouldn't be considered for it & now,
& now, & now - every fucking day to lie waiting for your
limbs to be torn apart so they can be broken back into ice, (traitors that they are).
& the issue with falling in love is i don't know how to make sense of the fact that what i'm
afraid of isn't that you're the eagle, but the god who lost interest
-because i can regrow a liver, but i can't regrow a heart.
and the issue with falling in love is it makes you realize you were so fucking
hungry for tenderness you've spent the past years eating at your own body & now
someone is touching it
and it exists
and you do not know how to ask for its forgiveness without giving it all away.
& the issue with falling in love is that i don't know how to tell you all of that.
nor how to tell you how i wish the bed sheets would wrap around themselves like
ribbons fledged in seamoss-flesh fresh from after the storm, become a
time capsule for whatever this is and live right between my
second and my third rib
where my
own fucking eagle comes to eat,
where all the bad things used to be,
but the issue with falling in love is that now that’s where you are
just you,
just you.
-you,
listen,
the issue about falling in love is that if you let me be in the soil of yearning i won't grow, i'll
rot;
but not before i sell my own vocal cords to try to make them into a knot (yes, even a gordian
one especially a gordian one) in the hope it would hold you at the door of everything, just one
more
minute so that in that minute i can tell you (in my own desecrated language which has now
learned to pillage itself) that the issue with falling in love is to not know
what's worse;
when the shrapnel-kiss explodes by virtue of it
not exploding at all,
how much i'd let you hurt me
or the fact that, this time,
you won't.
i have forgotten how numbers work
by Josh Cake
one
don't think i know how to count
seventeen
i am lost
shoe polish
numbers frighten me
denial
no. can't do this
guilt
don't know how many friends i have
bargaining
trying to count how many friends i have but i keep getting stuck at
bargaining
do i still count you
bargaining
Facebook still counts you
invoice
white flowers on every second pew
ten
a.m. stare at my phone all night rechecking the alarm so i don’t miss
sandwiches?
why do we pretend with catering estimates and ordered sets
as if numbers still mean anything
as if counting continues —
two
someone asks: do i have any favourite memories of you?
one
don't think i know how to count
Until Show’s End
by Beth Keehn
Lately I’ve been seeing an odd phenomenon on stage. Theatrical stages. In fact, all stages – every type and size of stage at the theatres I frequent. Old Arts Centres. Grand Lyric Theatres. Old converted cinemas with encrusted chandeliers. It’s the same every time. At every show that I attend, no matter where I am sitting in the audience, I see the same man standing at the front of the stage. The very same man, standing in the very same spot at the front of the stage. Every show. Every time.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s just a popular performer – a busy theatrical type, merely an in-demand, workaholic character player. A local footlight-seeking pest. You’d be forgiven because you’d never guess the reality of this strange situation. The man on the stage – on all those stages – is my father. But the catch is, you see, my Dad is not a performer and – more to the point – my Dad is, well, he’s no longer with us.
Can we, shall we, go back just a tad?
I write theatre reviews. I cover every type of stage show – from low-budget amateur theatrics (or what we prefer to call ‘community theatre’), to blockbusters with high production values, and crowd-pleasers that sit somewhere in between, relying on performers’ star quality. I like writing the reviews – just as I relish sitting alone in the dark, at one with my task. And to clarify – I don’t take notes. I strive to keep salient points in my head until the interval or show’s end.
I certainly don’t distract fellow audience members by using my phone as a note-taking device. In fact, I keep it switched off or on silent, as a matter of course. I can usually stay focused. Although, in less-than-exciting productions, my mind might wander to something I’ve read, or another (better) show I’ve seen, or how I wish I’d remembered to pre-order an interval drink, or what I’m going to have for dinner when I get home. Though, that doesn’t happen very often, I have to say.
But lately, I admit, I have been distracted. It’s that recurring figure on every stage, every time – every night, every matinee. Before orchestras, before comedies, before dramas, before musicals. As soon as a performance starts, there he is – my clean-cut Dad, his short back-and-sides, wearing a black 1960s suit. Yes, that’s the other thing – he’s young: about 20 years old; not 85 as he was when he left us.
Each time the lights dim, I shuffle in my seat, get comfortable, put away my programme – it’s that twilight time when the show is just about to start. There’s absolute silence, maybe a nervous cough, then nothing. And just as the footlights are about to sneak up, there he is – out he walks from the shadows in the wings and takes his position at centre stage. From there he stops briefly before sporting his famous (in friends-and-family circles at least), cheeky, all-knowing grin. He winks – usually just directly at me, but occasionally to someone else in the front row – before bowing confidently to the audience. Then he quietly turns his back on us completely. There’s a hush while we wait – anticipation cut short by a swift spring as he crouches to the ground, a leap up and into the air, and then a perfect backflip. My dear old Dad – except he’s young and skinny as a bean – firmly lands on his feet on the carpet before the front row, or he disappears down into the orchestra pit. It’s a curious supporting performance that all these shows share. And it’s not only odd because Dad left us, and this earth, more than six months ago, but what’s more, he’d never performed on stage at all in his whole life. He did admire talented performers but he himself was generally a quiet man (except after a tipple). There was one exception, which he’d be quick to point out.
He enjoyed one-show-only billing as part of his cousins’ dance band, back in the day in a small country town. His home town. He played the mandolin-banjo and he was only about 10 years old. It’s that dance hall gig that resonates today: that one performance fuelled his imagination for life. And he loved a good concert or musical theatre show.
But, now that I think of it, after he passed away, my Mum did tell us about one of their first dates. They had gone to see mutual friends performing in a local skiffle band. At the end of the set, Mum recalled – with a tiny tremour, a ripple in her voice, unsure if she should be revealing this secret now – Dad had taken to the stage in his neatly pressed stove-pipe trousers, polished shoes with neat white socks, and he’d backflipped off the stage – much to her shock and the amazement of their friends. Or so Mum told us now, in nostalgic, pensive mood, as we jotted down milestone notes for Dad’s eulogy. Best to leave that particular anecdote out, we decided. I don’t really remember why.
But, why did we decide that? It’s the sort of story he would have loved us to remember. Dash conventional wisdom; surprise the unsuspecting.
Perhaps that’s the reason for his appearance now.
Every time I sit in the dark of the theatre – the quiet of the audience lulling each show – the stillness seems to gently conjure him up. There he is: Dad taking centre stage, winking, and repeating his backflip before every performance. And it seems there’s nothing I can do to stop him. I suppose I’ll just have to sit in the dark and wait – until show’s end.
A Wall In Crete - Paleokastro heat
by George Vance
Hold still in bed for an hour :
willed catatonia
deep-in some-thing out-there
‘ This pale wall displays history
runnels rivers gushing meandering
drying up gullies in all directions
beings were here making many things
long gone long appeared ’
‘ The wall is dense with stars
speeding fleeing
meteors among them
twirling white streaks in the milky plane
fleeing
from what ( their dying pasts so present …
toward what ( their imminent futures …
known but not to them ’
‘ This white wall has an incipient black hole
for now a depression
whirling quantum-levering
striving for new dimensions
on the other side
is a room is room space un espace
dithering
while yet pass through the long-gone beings
to be long-gone and arrive again some-ever ’
Sometimes We Write Poems During The War
by Eva Danae Charidas
Sometimes we sing sad songs and drink
the wrong amount of wine on Tuesday
and wake up to find
that the earth has broken in half
only to help put each other back together again
under duvets surrounded by strawberries,
Al Jazeera, and emotional support novels.
Other times, good things come out of this dove-like grief
like filling my home with your multitudes
your humming in the kitchen
or watching you read Hemingway under the olive tree
in the sweet autumn sun.
And as you eat every last olive in this house
and I watch you walk out the door,
thank you for breaking my heart open
again and again and again.
Biographies
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Christian is a Singaporean poet who has been published notably in The Mays and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries, among many others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, placed 2nd for the Aryamati Poetry Prize, came in 3rd for the National Poetry Competition (Singapore), and was shortlisted for the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the Bridport Prize, and the Sykes Prize. He was a finalist at Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp and has workshopped with the Asia Creative Writing Programme and Berlin Writer’s Workshop.
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Brian Sheffield is a Pushcart Prize Nominated performance poet based out of the Central Coast of California. He is co-founder of Mad Gleam Press and is an editor with Moon Riot Press. In 2018, he performed at the National Poetry Slam in Chicago, representing Staten Island. He has performed and been published internationally among predominantly independent circles.
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Audrey Vinkenes is an American writer based in Helsinki. She previously lived in Paris. Audrey studies English and Norwegian literature, focusing on autofiction and memoir. Her work has been featured in The Opiate and Better Than Sliced Bread. She currently runs the newsletter Eller Hur? on Substack.
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Sandra Arnold’s work includes her two 2023 published books The Bones of the Story, Impspired Books, UK and Where the Wind Blows, Truth Serum Press, Australia and her 2019 books The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell, Mākaro Press, NZ; Soul Etchings, Retreat West Books, UK. Her short fiction has been published internationally and received nominations for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University, Australia.
www.sandraarnold.co.nz
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James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Lakeshore Review, and The Round. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)
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MARIUS PRESTERUD is a Norwegian artist working between Paris, Berlin and Oslo. He has toured Europe as a poet, as well as performed in galleries such as Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany, Henie Onstad Art Center, Kunstnernes Hus and the The Association of Norwegian Sculptors, Norway. In 2016 he enjoyed a mini writing residency at PLU.
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Erin Jamieson (she/her) holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. Her writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, including two Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of a poetry collection (Clothesline, NiftyLit, Feb 2023). Her latest poetry chapbook, Fairytales, was published by Bottlecap Press. Her debut novel (Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams) came out November 2023. Twitter: @erin_simmer
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DC Diamondopolous is an award-winning short story, and flash fiction writer with hundreds of stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. DC’s book Captured Up Close: 20th Century Short-Short Stories is her second book. She lives on the California coast with her wife. dcdiamondopolous.com
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Lola Krivosic is a writer & performer based in Paris whose work centers around the intersection of intimacy, violence & politics. When she is not annotating a yellowed copy of Louise Glück, she studies at Sciences Po & Columbia university, drafts policy proposals on and advocates for social justice, & watches Thelma & Louise, again.
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Josh Cake makes poetry, music, and comedy. Josh has held performance residencies in Australia, Italy, and France, and has published poems in Cordite, Breakwater Review, and Teesta Review. Josh's spoken word collection 'words to regret when i'm better at editing' is available at www.joshcake.com
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Beth Keehn works in London and Brisbane. She writes for Stage Whispers magazine, and has contributed content to Womankind, Fable Gazers’ podcasts, London Short Film Festival, Encounters International Film Festival, and a mix of academic and corporate brands. Her photography has been published by Paris Lit Up.
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George Vance. Reims, France. Author of A Short Circuit & Xmas Collage, from corrupt press. Has read at Paris venues IVY, Poets Live, Live Poets, Wice, Spoken Word. Published in Upstairs at Duroc, Bastille, on-line mags 9th degree, RETORT, EKLEKSOPEDIA, Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His video ‘Heights of Experience’ was presented in Brussels as part of ARTCETERA, and an experimental piece (In)(de)finite Gist was presented at the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference.
A version of ‘A Wall in Crete’ was previously published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal: https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/2024/01/four-poems-by-george-vance.html
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Eva, a seasoned conflict specialist, experienced poet, and humanitarian, has established herself in the cultural hub of Athens, Greece. Navigating the realms of both politics and art, she frequently employs poetry as a tool for expressing and exploring the emotional complexities of some of the most pressing global issues, as well the wider human condition.