Lodestone Poets #8

with Rishi Dastidar, Jessica Mookherjee and Anna Saunders
and Sarala Estruch, Lesley Sharpe and Dave Wakely

Thursday 21 September, Zoom, 7.30pm
Tickets: £Free

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Our friends at The Lodestone Poets return to bring us three more of the UK's finest poets. Expect writing that engages with climate emergency from the perspective of a god who finds themself powerless prevent one of their favourite species from their insatiable death wish, poems that explore the power of physical contact and the impact of intimacy (or its lack) through a cast of vivid characters from myth, legend and real life, and a deeply thrilling joyride into a glamorous/anti-glamorous world of sex, drugs and stolen books in eighties and nineties London.​

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Rishi Dastidar is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine. A poem from his debut, Ticker-tape, was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018. A pamphlet, the break of a wave, was published by Offord Road Books in 2019, and a second book, Saffron Jack, was published in 2020. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century, and also co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). His third collection, Neptune’s Projects, is published by Nine Arches Press.

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Jessica Mookherjee is a poet of Bengali heritage. Brought up in Mumbles, Wales, she's lived most of her adult life in London but now lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. She has worked in Public Health for over 20 years and has a background in psychology, biological anthropology and socio-ecology. Her book Tigress (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted as best second collection in the Ledbury Munthe Prize in 2021. Her book Notes from a Shipwreck  was published by Nine Arches Press in 2022, while Broken Sleep Books published her long poetic London poem, Desire Lines, in January 2023. Jessica is a board member of  the Poetry Society and a Co-Editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press. 

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Anna Saunders is the Founding Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival and holds an MA in Creative and Critical writing and six Arts Council Awards. Her collections are Communion and Kissing the She Bear, (Wild Conversations Press),  Struck, (Pindrop Press), Burne Jones and the Fox, Ghosting for Beginners, Feverfew and her latest - The Prohibition of Touch-(all Indigo Dreams). She's currently working on a collection entitled Under The Rose, which includes a sequence of poems in which she reimagines and gives a voice to Tennyson's Maud.

 

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