OKAY this is an annotated playlist of NARRATIVE VERSE from c.1380 to NOW

I LOVE NARRATIVE VERSE why *can’t* we have it all, stories and rhythm and rhyme and whatever we want? DON’T BELIEVE ME? Check it out!

– Cat Fitzpatrick

We Want It All

Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as a collection of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.

Deep Wheel Orcadia

Orkney is a small group of islands off the north coast of Scotland, and my home. Deep Wheel Orcadia is a space station a few hundred years in the future, which is almost but not entirely unlike Orkney. I wrote a verse novel about this place in my home language, Orcadian, which is a form of Scots strongly shaped by Old Norse. I wanted to take Orkney into space because small languages and small places are rarely imagined in futurity, and because doing that helped me write about things I care about, like how hope folds time over on itself, and how homecoming is a difficult utopia, and how the places the centre imagines as fringe are where life is made. The poems here are an extract of the central plot, a love story between Astrid, who grew up in the Deep Wheel and is returning home from art school in Mars, and Darling, who is running from a Martian life and looking for a place to call home. As in the book, the poems come with a parallel English translation of sorts, and you can read them as you please.

-- Harry Josephine Giles