We end Section XII of Issue One with poems in the afterglow - what has burned, loved, and survived.

From the strange intimacy of being seen in Cox’s poem Spectacle, to Jane Burn giving myth a body in all its complexities in The Mares of Thrace, to Przibram Wallis’s Memory Lane which walks grief through those remembered nature spots, to Rosie Garland’s two poems about illness and red kites, these later poems show how the aftershock can still glow, however faintly.

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What does it mean to love a living world while the systems around us unmake it?

The third Pocket Aftershock from The Aftershock Review, Ecoshock is edited by Glyn Edwards and gathers poems from the hot, flooded, flickering edge of the climate crisis.

These poems move through heat maps, flood lines, city lights, melting ice, plastic dolls, mould, supermarkets, an interactive cadaver exhibit and the strange guilt of carrying on while the world burns.

Featuring new poetry by Imtiaz Dharker, Glyn Maxwell, Di Slaney, Sophia Argyris, Lauren Thomas, Dave Simmons, Dr Anna Percy, Alec Finlay, Cath Drake, Aruna Stannard, Max Wallis, Matthew Haigh, Matthew Stewart, Clare Shaw, Suzannah Evans, Dean Atta, Harriet Tarlo, Rachael Clyne, Michelle Penn, Punyasloka Mohapatra, Pascale Petit, Zoe Brigley, Callan Waldron-Hall, Jeff Skinner, Corrina Board, Sam Grudgings, Lydia Unsworth, Glyn Edwards, Abigail Parry and Sean Borodale.

It is poetry in the aftermath of warning: political, tender, furious, funny, grieving, alive.

https://www.aftershockreview.com/product-page/ecoshock-pocket-aftershock-edited-by-glyn-edwards

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Rachael probably doesn’t know this, but for years I kept my Self Assessment tax details inside my copy of her book Sidereal, scribbled in sharpie in the front cover or opening pages. I carried it to every new flatshare, house, then back again. I knew I would never throw it away and, honestly, what type of identity thief is going to find them in a Picador poetry book on my shelves?

Anyway, quick note from me today, as I’m still onboarding distribution with Gardners and my brain is mostly ISBNs, spreadsheets and FTP clients.

I don’t have much to say about these poems by one of the most quietly astonishing poets we were lucky enough to publish in Issue One. Or rather: I don’t want to over-explain them.

In Selig, repetition becomes both symptom and spell: “They won’t keep me in line” returning again and again. In Atmospherics: “things fall apart softly / and have to be mended”. And in Framework of a Dream, the ice “famous for / not trembling” trembles now.

So today my suggestion is to just read them. Absorb them. And feel the shiver down your spine I felt when I first opened them.

Click here to buy Issue One

Rachael Boast’s recent publications include Hotel Raphael (Picador, 2021) and TIMESLIPS (Clutag Press, 2024). She is editor of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). Rachael is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Her new book Volvelle is available to pre-order now.

I’ve known John McCullough ever since he won the Polari Prize, in 2021, for his collection The Frost Fairs. (My pamphlet, Modern Love, was shortlisted, too.) Big love, John…!

When Issue One was in its larval stage John was one of the poets I needed to publish, quite frankly. And there is so much to admire in these five (!) poems: their wit, their oddness, their tenderness. Trauma here behaves unexpectedly, just like all the best poems in Aftershock. In To My Darkness, the shadow is not defeated but welcomed back as family. A hoverfly becomes “a levitating detective”; loneliness - a beetle; a Victorian pier drags its “old music” through the desert. There’s a surrealism that could sit down at a table and have a chat with Pascale Petit’s poems. And if the Issue had been ordered differently, they would have.

I love them.

Max

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It opens with Jacqueline Saphra’s “1976”, a poem that understands the cruelty of hindsight. Everything in it is still innocent because the damage has not arrived yet. The glaciers are still frozen, the ocean is still full of fishes, the night is still soft with song. But the reader is held in that terrible gap between what the poem’s fifteen-year-old self does not know and what we know is coming, even if we don’t have the exact details. What I love most about this poem is that it makes adolescence feel like something we are peering in on from the future.

Richard Skinner’s film poems then move us into another kind of unreality: cinema as dream. In “Black Swan”, identity keeps splitting and correcting itself, never allowed to rest in one body. In “Lost Highway”, the images arrive like clues from a nightmare. And in “Donnie Darko”, Frank speaks with the eerie intimacy of a figure who is part mask, part portal, part warning. All very apt for the films they’re drawing from, I must say!

Together, these poems set the terms for Dream Logic / Elegy / Afterglow, and what comes next in this section. Dreams as the place where fear, memory, performance and prophecy do their strangest work. Saphra gives us the moment before the fall. Skinner gives us the screen after the self has started to flicker.

You can buy issue one to read more!

Max

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I was messaging someone earlier about The Aftershock Review. They’re doing a Sub Club at Manchester Poetry Library. I realised I was probably saying the thing more clearly there than I do when I try to make it sound official.

So here it is.

When we are reading submissions, we are not sitting there thinking: is this poem “good”? Obviously we want good poems. But we had around 1,500 poems to read last issue.

So a no is very often not about lack of quality. It’s about sheer quantity. It’s about the fact that an issue has to become one thing, and there are only so many poems that can fit inside it before it stops being a magazine and starts being a shed.

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There are good poems I reject. There are poems I admire and still don’t take. There are poems that might have been a yes if they arrived in a different month, or next to different work, or when the issue was asking a slightly different question.

Which is horrible. But true.

So please don’t take a no from Aftershock as some grand judgement on your talent, your future, your soul, your truth, your entire relationship with language, etc.

Sometimes it’s just: there were 1,500 poems.

And one editor, and two contributing editors, with ADHD and a cat at the vet.

What I’m really looking for is the poem that makes me open the document and go:

That’s the technical editorial term.

I don’t mean shock for the sake of shock.

I don’t mean “this terrible thing happened and therefore the poem is automatically powerful.”

I definitely don’t mean gore.

I don’t mean a poem that has learned how to sound like the sort of poem magazines say yes to. I mean: no other poet could have written this.

I want a poem which shows me in its language that no other poet could have found this exact angle. This exact detail. This exact bit of weirdness. This exact line break. This exact terrifying little joke. This exact Mars bar, which somehow symbolises so much other stuff!

I want poems that surprise me.

Sometimes the surprise is tiny. Sometimes it’s a strange object. Sometimes it’s a line that turns left when I thought we were going right. Sometimes it’s a dark poem that suddenly lets in light. Sometimes it’s a poem about the worst thing in the world that somehow remembers kindness exists.

But because life is like that. The worst days still have a stupid advert on the radio. Grief still has to answer the door. Trauma still has to find the Tesco Clubcard, or order a new Driving License when you’ve lost it (it turned up in a cupboard I never open).

Recovery is not one big noble cinematic sequence. Sometimes it’s cooking yourself a meal for the first time after weeks of takeaways.

Sometimes it’s not dying because there was a new flavour of Fanta and you wanted to try it.

Some go to thoughts:

But I don’t necessarily mean the most traumatic thing. I mean the poem you’re a bit embarrassed by because it feels too much like yours. The poem you think might be your strongest work but no magazine has wanted it before. The poem that keeps coming back with a no, but you still believe in it.

Often I accept poems that have been rejected loads of times elsewhere.

And Aftershock is, at its best, a place for poems that don’t quite know where else to stand.

Also, very practical point: the last poem in the submission is often the best one.

I don’t know why poets do this, but they do.

They send the safer ones first and then tuck the electric one at the bottom like it’s a shameful little animal. Move it to the front. Please.

Let me see the weirdest one immediately.

The Forward Prize longlisted poems from Issue One are very different poems, but what they have in common is that no one else could have written them. That’s what I love. They aren’t interchangeable. They don’t feel workshopped into a smooth little pebble. They have their own pressure, their own risk, their own strange authority.

I want the poem only you could have written.

Max

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Poems by Katy Evans-Bush, Rhian Elizabeth and Gwyneth Lewis from Issue One of The Aftershock Review

I began The Aftershock Review when my own existence was very much in ruins. Addiction had done its long, freezing work, and sobriety was the cold-plunge, bolt-upright shock that made me reel: suddenly aware of what my life had become, with no clue what it might become next.

So I turned to poetry, trying to find a home again. And I did. It was a whole house at night with the light still on, waiting, door unlocked, ready.

I contacted poets. I scrambled with ideas. I built the thing from what I had left: grief, nerve, panic, tenderness, a printer’s quote, a Substack page, a Crowdfunder and a Duotrope and an inbox full of poems, all bound together with the stubborn belief that the aftermath deserved a language, and place, of its own. Not to mention my two contributing editors, Suzi Feay and Dr Anna Percy.

In Existence in Ruins, the poems move through broken landscapes of the self, of others, and of the world around them with exacting clarity and nerve.

Katy Evans-Bush’s “And What Flowers” gives us a mother after a stroke, standing “houseless now, in the doorway of her own house,” while those around her hold “out-of-date / maps, phrase books, tubes of ointment.” It is a poem about care, failure, bewilderment, and the private life still going on inside a person others cannot fully reach.

Her “Aunt B’s Walk Out of Hammersmith” enters the frightening logic of illness and cognitive disorientation: food forgotten, days slipping, carers coming and going, the body cold and wet, the mind making its own urgent sense of collapse. “Nothing seemed strange. Everything was fine / aside from the cold, and the fact that I was dead.” It is devastating because Aunt B is never only vulnerable. She is funny, stubborn, vivid, still trying to get somewhere.

Rhian Elizabeth’s “amsterdam” cracks grief down to its simplest, hardest truth: “girl loses her father, girl loses her mind.” The poem understands how grief can make a story lie before it can tell the truth. Its violence turns inward, then outward, then softens years later into the strange solitude of a bath in Amsterdam. I adore this poem so much, and Rhian latterly became a good friend partly because of our kinship over ridiculous cats.

Gwyneth Lewis’s “II – Shame” and “III – Kidnapped”, both from “First Rain in Paradise”, bring shame and violence into the open. In “II – Shame”, shame sends the speaker fleeing: “Anything, anything not to be seen.” In “III – Kidnapped”, violence is carried as anecdote, polished into social performance, until the final image opens underneath it: “His smile’s the entrance to a mine shaft.”

Still, life moves under the rubble.

Max Wallis, June 2026

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Sorry to send another email folks, but it’s almost the end of days… by which I mean submissions will be closed for Ecoshock.

Now… I need a nap.

SUBMIT NOW! Or the world really will burn.

Endless love from Aftershock HQ!

Max

PS on a personal note - I can’t believe it, and I am so so so grateful

Issue One is available still!

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After so much grief, damage, survival, illness and reckoning, POP VISION / LEAVECORE opens a stranger room: one full of broken biscuits, Tupperware, cultural static, online exhaustion, singing, scapegoats and the odd bright absurdity of being alive now.

When I wrote in the opening editorial that trauma speaks many languages, this was one of the languages I meant. Sometimes aftershocks arrive through pop culture, jokes, and internet debris.

It’s also a definite act: I didn’t want only “pure” trauma in the work. I wanted the trauma of struggling with Tupperware, like in Sophie Hall’s poem, too.

Andy Jackson, Sophie Hall, Sam Riviere and Rishi Dastidar each find a way to make the contemporary world feel unstable, funny, brutal and oddly tender. These poems understand that survival does not always look noble. Sometimes it looks like noticing the ridiculous thing at the edge of collapse.

This is one of the sections I love most because it reminds me that poetry can hold trauma without becoming trapped by it.

After trauma, there is still poetry. And sometimes, thank God, it is weird.

Max Wallis, June 2026 xxx

You can buy Issue One here: https://www.aftershockreview.com/product-page/issue-1-the-aftershock-review

Acute
Maura Dooley

The line of trust runs at 45°,
the point of intersection changing

from nursery to nursing home,
via hospital where a flask,

suspended,
pumps its goodness into a tired hand.

Wire, tube, cord, your outstretched arm,
the many accents of love.

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Clare Shaw - substack:

Clare Shaw’s poems make the house unreliable.

In “The Epistemology of the Staircase”, stairs are supposed to mean movement, change, progress. Clare lets that symbol rot, because the staircase remembers too much. It creaks though it is stone. It holds the mother’s feet, the heavy rain of training, the glass floor nobody falls through, the body that has “never fallen downstairs” but “been pushed”. Suddenly progress is not ascent. It is a story other people tell while the danger keeps whispering. What I love most about this poem is how eerie and uncanny it is!

Then in the second poem the witches arrive.

What I love here is how quickly Clare turns childhood fear into historical weather. Pendle is not decoration. The trials, the dream, the green face at the window. A child’s nightmare becomes a way of understanding what happens when people, madness, fear and authority meet. The final line - “dream that you saved me” - is devastating, of course, because it knows rescue is often only available in sleep.

Nuala Watt

Nuala Watt’s poems bring the section down to the level of bills, rent, shoes, teapots, impossible shops.

“Elegy for Tchai Ovna, Glasgow” is an elegy for a teahouse, but really it is about the civic places we lose before we understand they were holding us together. The meeting house, the library, the gaps. A pregnancy spoken aloud in a room that later disappears. A child dancing round the remnants. Late openings becoming scarce. The slow conversion of beloved spaces into flats, absence, memory.

“Budget” is almost unbearably calm. School shoes. PAYMENT DECLINED. Rent ascending. The chancellor’s statement trending somewhere above the shortfall. Nuala makes the national intimate without grandstanding. The economy is not an idea here. It is the message on the screen. It is the child’s feet. It is the future reduced to “never mind”.

Together, Clare and Nuala show two different kinds of collapse: the haunted architecture of family and history, and the public places, payments and small securities disappearing under ordinary life. The system does not always announce itself as violence. Sometimes it is a staircase you cannot climb. Sometimes it is a shop that becomes impossible. Sometimes it is a declined payment where the future should be.

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The first poems in Section IX begin at the point where systems stop pretending to be neutral.

Becky Cherriman and Madailín Burnhope take us straight into the places where the state becomes physical. These poems know the state does not only fail from a distance. It enters. It touches. It delays. It assesses. And it records.

But it keeps also asking for patience from people who have already spent too much of their lives being patient with harm.

Becky Cherriman

In Becky Cherriman’s opening poem, the body is already inside the machine. The nurse, the padding, the chemicals, the white cloth: care and violation are held close enough to trouble each other. The body is managed, entered, helped, hurt, mended, exposed. There is no easy purity here. Medicine can save and still feel like surrender. Repair can have the texture of force, even when it’s also there to help.

“Skins” widens the wound. Power becomes something worn or removed. Here the system is not one building or institution. It is older and more atmospheric. It is in what gets said to a father. It is in who is believed to belong. It is in the histories lovers carry into bed with them, whether they want to or not.

The poem’s impossible wish - to swap skins in reparation - breaks my heart because it knows love cannot refund history.

And then comes “Crisis Loan, 2000”, one of the clearest poems I know about what bureaucracy does to the soul.

Eight hours at the DSS. Plastic chairs. A shatterproof screen. A room full of people made to wait so long they begin to disappear in front of one another. Nobody is absent, exactly. Everyone is there. But the system has already thinned them out. It has made them into cases, delays, voices, claims, interruptions. It has made hope feel administratively inappropriate.

And in the middle of this, Ernest.

Ernest is not an argument. He is a child who wants fruit, who wants out, who has been strapped in too long, who screams until the room has to hear what it has been refusing to hear. When he is hit, the poem does not offer the reader a clean place to stand. The speaker looks and says nothing. Everyone says nothing.

This is where Becky’s poem becomes devastating. It does not let us pretend the state’s violence remains inside the state. It leaks into parenting. Into tiredness. Into witness. Into the body of a toddler. Into the body of a mother who has been held too long in a room designed to make need feel like an offence.

Madailín Burnhope

Madailín Burnhope’s “In These Final Days Before Your Transformation” brings another system into view: the medical gaze, the category, the diagnosis, the clipboard logic of people deciding what a body is before the person inside it has finished becoming.

The poem is addressed to a wolf-maiden. Marie is not presented as a case. She is creaturely, beloved, strange, vivid, on the edge of change. The poem wants her to have pleasure before the world tightens around her: texture, pattern, colour, whatever brief freedom is possible before language starts making claims.

But the systems arrive here too. Doctors. Compliance. Medication. Observation. The awful little theatre of being watched by people who think watching is the same as knowing. Burnhope’s blessing has teeth because it knows what is coming. It knows bodies like Marie’s are rarely left alone to become.

What moves me is the poem’s refusal to make survival grand. It asks for something smaller and more desperate: let her live well for a while. Let her antagonise doctors. Let her exceed the file. Let her remain wolf enough to trouble the tent they pitch around her womanhood.

That empty wheelchair near the end changes the temperature of the poem. Suddenly the blessing is not abstract. It is grief speaking forward. It is someone looking into absence and needing another life not to be swallowed by the same machinery. It is care sharpened by loss.

The state likes abstraction. Poetry does not have to! That’s what I love so much about these poems, they refuse that abstraction.They show that systems do not collapse in theory. They collapse onto people.

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It was a leap year, and time is strange. It was a Sunday. So the Sunday around the 25th is also the day I think about this most months too.

I think about past-Max a lot. I hope he understands how much of current-Max exists because even vulnerable people are strong when they are given a chance.

Instead, somehow, through the vodka and the remnants of drugs rattling through my nervous system, despite the tears, maybe because of them, I got out near St Paul’s carrying a bag with a bottle of Glenn’s in it and wept in the pre-morning service.

I was wearing pyjama shorts and losing my mind.

Sometimes now I wonder if that was the day I found the beginning of my mind again. Because it finally opened the gates out of my old life.

I was detained. I went to hospital. I lied to get out of hospital. Days later I fled London, got sober, got clean, reconciled and reconnected with family I had mostly been estranged from for years.

I wasn’t well. We didn’t quite know how unwell. All I could do was understand that my ego or pride or addiction or fear, or the cage of a life I didn’t know how to leave, had failed me.

I surrendered to wiser people than myself.

I’m now almost 2 years and 3 months sober.

After I wrote this piece for the Standard, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD too.

My world shrank again. On and off I was bed bound with night terrors, extreme fatigue and flashbacks. I would have episodes in daylight while attempting to do simple tasks. My parents cooked me lunch and dinner for more than a year.

And somewhere in that smallness, Aftershock began.

Not because I was well. And definitely not because I had a plan. But because I needed somewhere to hold the aftershock and people to ride the ripples with me.

I needed poems that understood what happens after. I needed language for the body still remembering when everyone else thinks the crisis is over. I kept thinking, surely I am not the only one.

The Aftershock Review came from that bed. From my parents’ house. From the soup Mum made me most days. From the night terrors. From recovery. From shame. From tenderness. From the tiny daily miracle of not going back and the endless choice to not leave the world forever when I could have any day.

Life is brilliant and awful and brutal and overwhelming and hard. And the last year has been, even with the success of Aftershock, a very difficult time.

But this is the strange gift of having once wanted not to be here: you learn that nothing can change what happened to you, but you can still build something from the place where it nearly ended.

You can still find people.

You can still make a life.

So here we are.

Link to the piece here.

When I came back from London, sober and clean, after twelve years away from much of my poetry community, I found myself thinking about the people I wanted to reach out to. Jackie was one of them.

Me and Anna outside Oxfam.

(A lifetime, before a lifetime, ago.)

I had known her through the poetry world, through performance, through that wild, generous, northern ecosystem of poets. I thought, one day, I would message her. I thought there would be time.

Then Jackie died, around the time I was beginning to imagine getting back in touch.

That is one of the brutal lessons of returning to a life after a long absence. You come back changed, full of intention, full of apologies, full of hope, and discover that the world has not waited. People have moved, suffered, died, survived, disappeared, become ill, become famous, become parents, become ghosts. The old rooms are still there, but not everyone is in them.

In part, though, Jackie’s death also brought people back together. Anna and I reconnected. Others circled. The poetry community, in its strange, fractured, stubborn way, remembered how to gather.

I wanted to devote part of Issue One to Jackie not because The Aftershock Review could somehow contain what she meant, but because it could make a space around her. A little orbit. A place where her own final poem could sit beside Miles’s grief, beside Gerry Potter’s tribute, beside poems that understood illness, survival, humour, rage, love and the body as things that cannot be tidied into one clean category.

Jackie’s work mattered because it refused that tidiness. She could be funny without being light. Devastated without being defeated. Political without becoming abstract. Tender without becoming soft. She knew the body as a site of pain, performance, comedy, indignity, fury and brilliance. She made language out of what many people are taught to hide.

That feels central to Aftershock.

Issue One was about naming the damage. But this section was also about naming love. The love that remains after illness. The love that survives the bureaucracies of hospitals, the absurdities of care, the little pins for SIM cards, the impossible errands of grief. The love between poets. The love inside communities that do not always know how to hold each other until loss forces their hands open.

Publishing this section now feels like a way of saying: here she is. Here we are. Here is one of the emotional centres of the first issue.

And here, too, is the beginning of our movement beyond it.

Much love,

Max Wallis

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I am thrilled to announce the first collections in the new Aftershock Poets series coming throughout 2026. I am also going to be looking for another collection and launching a limited New Voices pamphlet series.

HARD GRAFT
by Di Slaney @di_slaney

I FOUND GOD ALONE AND HE WAS GRIEVING
by Oliver James Lomax @oliverjlomax83

THOUGH I LIKE RAIN
by Dale Booton @dale.booton

ALL THE TIMES I WENT MAD AND LOVED
by Dr Anna Percy @drannapercy

MALEDICTIONS
by Suzi Feay @suzisbookbag

After a year in which The Aftershock Review has grown from one magazine into five books, hundreds of poems, and a community of readers and writers I could never have imagined, this feels like the next necessary step.

Aftershock Poets will publish full poetry collections shaped by the same urgency, care and editorial seriousness that built the magazine: work with nerve, pressure, beauty, danger and life in it.

These are books of labour, grief, faith, class, weather, madness, rage, wit, survival, queerness, spellcraft, tenderness and aftermath.

Five poets. Five extraordinary books.

And the beginning of a new chapter for Aftershock. And maybe the beginning of a lot more work - haha!

If you want to hear more about this please sign up to both this Substack and also our mailing list on our website.

Much love,

Max Wallis

In the last twelve months, The Aftershock Review has published five books, 393 poems, and 210 poets. We have reached readers far beyond anything I imagined when this began.

And I am proud of that. Deeply proud.

But I also want to be honest with you. I am tired.

As one Aftershock year closes, another begins. And this next twelve months will be enormous in its own way. There will be full collections. There will, I hope, be pamphlets. There will be EcoShock. There will be two more mainline issues.

And again, at the centre of it all, there is this spinning piece.

By which I mean: me, mostly.

Some of you will know this, some of you won’t, but I do a lot of this by myself. My co-editors Dr Anna Percy and Suzi Feay work miracles behind the scenes, and I don’t want for a second to suggest otherwise. Their care, intelligence, editing and outreach have helped make Aftershock what it is.

But the typesetting, the packing, the posting, the communications, the emails, the social media, the design, the admin, the little fixes, the 4am frenzies, the constant keeping-the-thing-moving: much of that is me. And so the weight of the momentum hangs on me too.

Aftershock exists because people have believed in it. Because poets have trusted it with extraordinary work. Because readers have bought the books, shared the posts, written back, turned up, subscribed, told someone else.

That kind of support matters more than I can say.

So if Aftershock has meant something to you this year, I would be grateful for whatever form your support can take. Buying an issue. Sharing a post. Ordering a magazine or pamphlet. Telling a friend. Coming to an event. Sending a kind word. Helping this magazine keep reaching the people who might need it.

None of this is small. I started The Aftershock Review because I wanted to make a home. A place for survival, queerness, grief, madness, class, tenderness, rage, recovery, and all the complicated crap of being alive.

I am having a rest this weekend.

I say that, and yet here I am, writing an email.

Which is perhaps the problem, and perhaps the point. Aftershock has become a living thing. It keeps moving. It keeps asking. It keeps finding people. I am just learning, in real time, that even the work you love can ask a lot of the body.

I came up with this idea when I was bed-bound with PTSD, flailing but paralysed by the horrible nature of that beast. Some days still, it returns, but this time I have to get back up to do the work.

Aftershock in a sense is the reason I am still functioning. Which means, by extension, so are you.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for helping Aftershock become something far bigger, stranger, braver, and more necessary than I could have made alone.

With gratitude,

Max Wallis
Editor, The Aftershock Review

Our new issue is out soon!

I finished typesetting it yesterday. Preorder here:

New Submissions:

Issue Four

Out late summer or autumn.

Ecoshock

Edited by Glyn Edwards!

This has been quite the undertaking, dear friends.

But here we go: 112 poems. 69 poets.

Someone once asked me, when I started all this: how can you possibly hope to fill books with that many poets? Do that many people really write about trauma well?

And the answer, again and again, is yes. They really do.

In the last 12 months we have published 5 books, 393 poems, and 210 poets.

Issue Three brings together a record-breaking number of poets for us in one volume.

Featuring new work by Dan O’Brien, Maura Dooley, Fiona Sampson, Abeer Ameer, Raymond Antrobus, Aaron Kent, Hollie McNish, Yuri Leving, Helen Mort, Blake Morrison, Catherine Redford, Jessica Mookherjee, Tom Branfoot and many more.

We have nurses, academics, doctors, translators, playwrights, editors, critics, prize-winners, debut voices, survivors. From new to established, these are poets who write through the fault-lines: grief, illness, family, war, class, desire, faith, silence, aftermath.

Issue One named the damage.

Issue Two mapped the fragments that remain.

Issue Three asks perhaps the most dangerous question of all: what do we need but a bit of hope?

Because I do, you do, we all do.

And believe it or not - The Aftershock Review is still beginning.

Pre-order a copy today