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Intrinsic Evanescence

Will Alexander on the poetry of the rarefied atmosphere of a friendship.

Lovesickness and ‘The Love Thief’

An 11th-century poem of love, lust and possibly gruesome death still resonates today.

The meanings of hurt

In the early modern period, gruesome incidents of self-castration and other types of self-injury garnished the literature of the time. Alanna Skuse explores the messages these wounds conveyed.

Finding the words to talk about emptiness

Shored up by a diagnosis and medication, Cassie Doney tried to find out more about the profound feeling of emptiness they were experiencing. But research is thin on the ground.

Political brilliance and the power of self-promotion

How do you convince people you’re exceptional? Meet the ultimate self-styled genius.

How electromagnetic therapy inspired me

Poet Sarah James explores how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treated her depression and influenced her art.

Lustmord and the three perspectives of murder

Artist Jenny Holzer's work shines a light on the three perspectives of sexual murder: the victim, the perpetrator and the observer.

Language

Our bodies convey stories through an alphabet of shrugs and shoulder poems. If your shoulders could talk, what poems would they tell?

Blood money: Taking periods out of poverty

Periods are not a wound that needs to heal, nor is the blood a sign of injury. So why are we still so repelled by them?

Eels and feels

For Georgian Londoners, the allure of electric animals was both intellectual and sensual.

Found items

Books leave their traces in our minds, but we leave traces of ourselves in books too, as these fascinating items found inside old works show.

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

Writing back to authority

As she cuts up old doctors’ letters and uses them to compose absurd poems, Caroline Butterwick reflects on the catharsis of creation and proposes writing as a way to take back control.

On contagion

Reading descriptions of the way humans become infested by parasitic flatworms, Daisy Lafarge experienced painful physical symptoms. Perhaps the very creature she was studying had invaded her body.

Little feet on Pett Level Beach

Poet and author Penny Pepper has vivid memories of childhood beach trips when her father was still alive, enthusiastically encouraging her curiosity and love of nature.

Kathryn Mannix’s prescription for writing

The Wellcome Book Prize shortlisted author of ‘With the End in Mind’ answers five questions on health, inspiration and storytelling.

Generation portraits

Photographer Julian Germain’s major project focusing on portraits of multi-generational families came to a sudden halt during the various Covid-19 lockdowns. Here families celebrate coming together again in words and images.

Intertwined with air

Siwakorn Odochao details his people’s way of perceiving trees and humans as intimately connected, and draws on the air as the element that weaves between them. Through the co-dependency of humans and trees to prepare the air for each other, he elaborates on the relationship between air, health and environment.

Divining the world through an artist’s almanac

Amanda Couch's artists book, 'Huwawa in the Everyday: an almanac' is inspired by the entrail like folds of a medieval folding and its function as a guide for astrological divinations linking the body, health and the heavens. Like the original almanac her work is designed to be carried out into the wider world.

Pum Dunbar’s living lessons

Read the ‘legends’ that give insight into Pum Dunbar’s creative process while producing her recent series of collages.

Titans in the landscape

The eye of darshan

The Hindu concept of darshan means “divine revelation”, but it’s also about the multilayered ways in which we see the world around us. Adrian Plau explains how one image in a Panjabi manuscript relates to darshan, and why it’s so striking.

History of condoms from animal to rubber

Come on a journey from the first recorded condoms in the 16th century to the modern female condoms in the 1990s – and everything in between.

Seeking the hoarder in literature

As she strives to deepen her understanding of hoarding, Georgie Evans turns to books. But depictions of hoards and hoarders are few and often sparse, except in one surprising place.

Why the world needs collectors

Those who collect play an important role as “facilitators of curiosity”, says Anna Faherty.