Stewed Rhubarb Press

24/11/2025

Today at 1pm University of Glasgow Memorial Chapel, Liz Macwhirter is in conversation with Colin Herd for Creative Conversations!💙💙💙

If you can't make it in person, join online and pick up a copy of Blue: a lament for the sea from our website.

The poetry pamphlet Blue: a lament for the sea comprises one long poem in free verse, voicing the grief of a lone woman swimming off the Scottish Hebridean Isle of lona.

Dusk falls. Oceans entangle birth with death.
Unsettling lines keen across the space of the page. With the scope of a lyric epic, the univocal turns into the universal - even polytemporal, touching other dimensions of time and reality. Three concepts of arising merge and distil in the poetry: the rising seas of climate breakdown today; lona arising above an apocalyptic sea flood drowning all else in a Gaelic medieval myth; and in deep time, colliding tectonic plates forced the Earth's crust up to the surface, forming lona.

The iconic Celtic pattern of nature intertwining with the eternal. And the spirituality of the medieval anchoress, Julian of Norwich, for whom a hazelnut and all things homely become two-way gateways to the divine. The material-spiritual triad resonates with trauma-informed spirituality and its emphasis on wounded bodies, on hurting places, on collapsing ecosystems and the urgent collective need to bear witness to this trauma. Eyes-wide-open, heart full-thinking, taking in as much reality as possible. Blue: a lament for the sea holds us in loving solidarity.

All these elements infused the writing of the poetry and narrative arc and lead the poem to its own inexorable conclusion. This contemporary lyric epic bears witness to our shared grief, even reframing our response. Love is lament; hope is action.

Read more about Liz via the following links where you can book to join Liz and Colin in person in Glasgow or join online today and order this stunning pamphlet from our website. Books also available at the event:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creative-conversations-liz-macwhirter-tickets-1728883429879

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/blue-a-lament-for-the-sea-pre-order/

03/11/2025

Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not by Carl
Alexandersson (2023)

Rooted in flowers and the Swedish language, the poems in Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not shape two overlapping narratives: one of family and one of q***r love. In the interweaving of the two we find acceptance, understanding, love and joy, the seeds of how to live with grief and how to begin again.

Carl Alexandersson (he/him) is a q***r spoken word poet and writer, based in Glasgow, hailing from Smaland, Sweden. He was selected for the BBC Words First programme in 2021, Highly Commended for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2022, and a runner-up for the Grierson Verse Prize 2022.

"Förgätmigej /| Forget-me-not blooms with dreamy nostalgia and wistful stillness. Attuned to the rhythms and cadences of life's smaller moments, Alexandersson skillfully moves between English and Swedish while honouring the etymology of his words, allowing each of his lines to take root and flourish into a generous garden of quiet observation. Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not breaks through life's overwhelming noise to find refuge in the small everyday like two lovers walking through a garden and getting to know one another through aimless conversations or a grandson looking through memorabilia in a family attic. What Alexandersson shares in these poetic moments is stunning and will pull at your heart strings." - Andrés N. Ordorica, author of At Least This I Know.

"I love Carl Alexandersson's work, and Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not shows exactly why: deliberately crafted, and skillfully held, it is filled with tenderness and humour as it charts journeys of love, family, and countries, the speaker navigating key questions and realisations in poems which are filled with voice and poignancy. I love how Carl's writing finds beauty and meaning in the everyday, with a signature playfulness and tenderness that is all his own. A joyful presence in poetry, I can't wait to watch his career - like the many flowers of his collection - bloom and thrive." - Nadine Aisha Jassat, author of Let Me Tell You This.

Order your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/forgatmigej-forget-me-not/

27/10/2025

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21/10/2025

The world may be the same (2023) by Hannah Lavery and Marjorie Lotfi

Poems on Being & Otherness inspired by Edwin Morgan

Supported by The Edwin Morgan Trust's Second Life Award, in spring 2023 Hannah Lavery and Marjorie Lotfi entered into a conversation through a series of poem-letters to explore their experiences of being women ano poets of colour living in Scotland. Inspired by the poetry of Edwin Morgan, The World May Be The Same explores what it is to be always asked to represent the notion of 'shared heritage' when often, in practice, that heritage means being excluded, belonging to neither.

Marjorie Lotfi is an Iranian-American who has lived in the UK for over 20 years. Her writing considers displacement, home and belonging in the context of the natural world. Marjorie writes with the 12 collective of women writers and is regularly commissioned to create new work. Her poems have won competitions, been published and anthologized widely (including in Scotland's Best Poems) and been performed on BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio 4. She is a Scottish Book Trust Ignite Fellow and a winner of the inaugural James Berry Prize. Her first collection will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and her pamphlet Refuge, poems about her childhood in revolutionary Iran, is published by Tapsalteerie.

Hannah Lavery is a poet, playwright and director. Her poetry pamphlet Finding Seaglass was published by Stewed Rhubarb and her debut collection, Blood Salt Spring, was published in 2022 by Polygon. The Drift, her highly acclaimed autobiographical lyric play toured Scotland as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Season 2019. Her play Lament for Sheku Bayoh premiered at Edinburgh International Festival in 2020 and she was appointed Edinburgh Makar in November 2021 for a three-year term. She is an associate artist with the National Theatre of Scotland and one of the winners of the Peggy Ramsay/Film4 Award 2022. She is also an experienced workshop facilitator and won a Leadership Award from Creative Edinburgh for her work with Writers of Colour and her curated film poetry series Sorry I am on Mute for Fringe of Colour.

Pick up yours here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/the-world-may-be-the-same-by-hannah-lavery-and-marjorie-lotfi/

30/09/2025

All the plants I have half-grown by Linden K McMahon (2024)

From the inevitable anxiety of ecological crisis, the ecopoems in All the plants I have half-grown follow the strange, uncomfortable, glorious, glittering threads that link us to our ecologies, carefully pulling us through the magic of q***r kin-making and towards a sense of reciprocity and belonging.

Linden K McMahon is a writer, performer, and arts & nature connection facilitator - they write about human connections with ecologies, utopian dreams, belonging, and q***r joy.

"I have rarely read poems that try so honestly to enter into relationship with the non-human: plants, birds, fungi, land. McMahon's poems are acts of connection, committed to imagining better. 'The words link [us] to the lives that swirl around us', knowing this work is tricksy and incomplete and doing it anyway. The poems are full of play and song and mourning: a mourning that is active, that goes out to plant and grow." - Miriam Nash

"These poems have good rich soil under their fingernails. Speak to an intimate relationship with ecology, Linden McMahon is singing through the hard and rewarding work of growing a world of kinship, of reciprocity. With deep love and furious heartbreak, the lyrics here map out ways of knowing the world and each other that offer precious hope. There's wide-eyed wonder here, but earthly knowledge too. The writing refuses cynicism and embraces a bodily experience of reality. Like all the best gardens, this pamphlet is full of flowers and thorns, full of rich scents and tangled roots, and is always growing towards the sun." - Harry Josephine Giles

Read more and pick up your copy over at our website:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/all-the-plants-i-have-half-grown-by-linden-k-mcmahon/

23/09/2025

In Wolf's Skin (2024) by Titilayo Farukuoye

A memorandum of strength, fierceness and love, speaking to the importance of standing for a world you want to live in...

Contemplating power and heritage, In Wolf's Skin offers a means to articulate some realities of our colonial legacies. This pamphlet is a memorandum of strength, fierceness and love, speaking to the importance of standing for a world you want to live in. It is a love letter to Black women, all of us whose identities face marginalisation and those who bear witness and speak up, as we continue to collectively raise our voices for liberation.

In Wolf's Skin weaves heritage, culture and language across central and northern Europe from Scotland, Austria and Norway reaching to Nigeria and Cameroon, providing space for multilingualism, multi-tradition and
-heritage lives, identities and forms of being beyond any expected norm.

Titilayo Farukuoye is a writer, educator and organiser based in Glasgow. Their work addresses social justice and community care and is informed by dreaming and the radical imagination. Titilayo co-directs the Scottish BPOC Writers Network (SBWN) and is a winner of the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

'These poems document life in a world that regards you as a wolf. In poem after poem, I recognise how a right to exist here is questioned, how we are asked to apologise and retract in the face of ever-present danger. And yet, the poems don't stop there; they also show us how others (from ancestors to characters we've never met) can help us forgive and connect, how we find a way to breathe and live in - and even love - our flawed world! -Marjorie Lotfi

'A window into the contemporary legacies of a fierce black feminist poetic forged in the 1980s. These are poems that acknowledge and affirm the presence of their readers, fluid and generous, they invite us to witness an artful defiance of the strictures of race, class and gender! - Lola Olufemi

Pick up yours here: https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/in-wolfs-skin-by-titilayo-farukuoye/

12/09/2025

Our author Ian Macartney reads at AFK SPAM zine & Press in Glasgow this Sunday 14th September! ☀️

Summer may be over but do not fear.. AFK returns at this Sunday 14th September and this time it’s a special collab with our good pal, the micropress Sincere Corkscrew. For this one we’re taking a hybrid/ prose/ performance slant. Think words, drones, electronics, a celtic flair.

Free entry. Doors and start time slightly earlier for his one - doors at 6 for 6.30 sharp start.

The readers:
Ian Macartney
Madeleine McCluskey




The performers:x


Takes place in the upstairs bar, unfortunately not wheelchair accessible.

Bring all pals!

12/09/2025

Now open for pre-order: Blue: A Lament for the Sea by Liz MacWhirter. 🌊 🌊 🌊

Blue: a lament for the sea is one woman's journey through the interstices of land and sea, grief and love. The medieval Gaelic myth of the Isle of lona escaping an apocalyptic flood infuses. MacWhirter's contemporary lyric epic. Words unravel from deep time to the Anthropocene and our collapsing ecosystems, asking: what is hope in these times?

"In haunting, melodic lyric, MacWhirter turns language itself into a 'thin place' of remembering, reckoning and renewal." - Jenn Ashworth

"A powerful work of mourning and hauntings. At once elegy and call to arms, this is a spellbinding meditation on margins and oceanic longing that leaves the reader changed." - CJ Cooke

"As our world grows bluer, through sea level rise, floods, and storms, we need to listen to poets. In phrases that capture oceanic movements and both medieval and contemporary seascapes, 'Blue' charts our ecological grief and abiding connections to water and rock, humans and seabirds, surf and tides. Listen to these voices!" - Steve Mentz

'''Blue' carries its weighty material easily, in a free, slim, slender verse, immediately accessible, emotionally buoyant in a challenging narrative of discovery and disclosure ... The lyrical exploration that the poem enacts is fraught and yet beautiful: its tone is exactly as its subtitle discloses, a 'lament', a keening, and yet it is wide-eyed at the colour and vividness of the visual, and the spiritual substance lona provides." - Alan Riach

Liz MacWhirter is a writer, speaker and theologian. Her debut novel, Black Snow Falling (Scotland Street Press, 2018), gained a Carnegie Medal nomination, and her poetry is published by Lucy Writers, Yale GCRE, Theology in Scotland and 4M Netlabel. Liz has spoken at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and at the Universities of Yale, Oxford, and St Andrews. Her PhD,
‘When Hope Takes Flight,' explores theopoetics and trauma (University of Glasgow). Liz spends as much time as possible in nature, hiking around her home in the Border hills.

Pre-order here: https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/blue-a-lament-for-the-sea-pre-order/

03/09/2025

A poem from Love & Other Cancers (2024) by Olivia Thomakos. 🩷💙

The poems in Love & Other Cancers are deeply personal yet universally resonant, deftly exploring the struggles of our life journeys as we discover ourselves and navigate familial, friendly, and romantic relationships through seasons of illness, loss, and change.

''Love And Other Cancers' stretches the mind's eye with a language of deep attention and meticulous, hopeful curiosity. Here are poems of stillness and longing, of piecing things together, of tricks of the light."
- Tessa Berring

"A moving, rich and assured debut pamphlet that flows through a circuit of veins containing cancer, clinics, incomprehensible doctors, musical notation [rests] and (I didn't say it) love. Any poetry that invokes 'buzzards' is alright with me."
- Nicky Melville

"Olivia Thomakos' 'Love & Other Cancers' offers musicality and excitement throughout. 'Earth peels like an orange' on one page ('Molting'), while 'Your sundial ancestor calls' on another ('A Love Letter'). Thomakos' writing feels conversational and confessional but also controlled and measured. There is a lightness to it and yet nothing feels written simply for the sake of it. An assured debut, and one I'm excited to read again."
- Sean Wai Keung

Olivia Thomakos is an Ohio-born writer, teacher, and editor. Her poem ‘What You Wish For’ won the 2022 Grierson Verse Prize. She is Poetry Editor of Origin Stories: An Anthology of Beginnings and Managing Editor of Tiny Flames: Voices from Ukraine, both with Forest Publishing. Her poetry can be found in Gutter, Berfrois, and elsewhere. www.oliviathomakos.com

Pick up your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/love-other-cancers-by-olivia-thomakos/

27/08/2025

sun-drunk by lan Macartney (2024)

☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅 ☀️🧡🌅

sun-drunk is a pamphlet of poems that are meant to be read out loud, of summer jobs/kisses/ wanders, for performance/protest, warm-hotfruity-and/or-sultry. These are poems drunk not just on the sun, but on every emotion which whirs underneath its glow - even in the bright light of winter months. Some of these poems were commissioned for stage, some for screen(s), and others have never appeared before.

Ian Macartney can be found online at ianmacartney.scot. Previous publications include The Infinite Fury and other stories (Strange Region), Turtleshell (Saló Press) and Shale Bings (Broken Sleep Books). His work has been featured in The Poetry Review, PROTOTYPE, The Scotsman and The Guardian.

"Encompassing hedonism and a deep desire for connection, sun-drunk fizzes with a fierce creativity as well as a sense of humanity and physicality that envelops the reader in its passionate embrace."
- Ricky Monahan Brown

"This is gorgeous poetry. Not an adjective I would normally deploy in any critique. But there is nothing 'normal' about Macartney's collection. It performs the remarkable feat of yoking an absolutely contemporary sensibility, encrusted by the jargon of internet and social media, to a kind of high and flighty rhetoric that gives some of these poems an ecstatic and exhilerating energy. There is also a plainer speech here and some very moving love poetry. In sun-drunk you will find a veritable orchestration of syntax, wise to its virtuoso techniques but unwilling to relinquish and often productive of genuine tenderness. A rare achievement."
- David Kinloch

Pick up your copy of sun-drunk here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/sun-drunk-by-ian-macartney/

22/08/2025

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19/08/2025

Poem by Jeda Pearl from Hunter's Voices (2024) edited by Alan Riach.

Hunter’s Voices is an anthology of poems responding to paintings and objects in the gallery and museums of the Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow. Some of the finest poets of contemporary Scotland, writing in English, Scots and Gaelic languages, and in a variety of poetic forms, take us into the Hunterian spaces. Their poems are complemented by beautiful reproductions of paintings and objects from different centuries and around the globe.

Hunter’s Voices is not only a showcase for the Hunterian Collection but also questions the priorities of museum and gallery acquisition. It celebrates the priority of educational resources and the aesthetic brilliance of works of art but also explores the enquiries and themes raised by the collection as a whole. And it is a demonstration of the ways in which poetry works to open an interrogation of the silence such objects and paintings normally reside within. It is a form of redress.

Edited by Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, and featuring poetry from Lesley Benzie Colin Bramwell, Lynn Davidson, Gerrie Fellows, Bashabi Fraser, Anne Frater, Jane Goldman, David Kinloch, Hannah Lavery, Liz Lochhead, Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, Lindsay Macgregor, Pàdraig MacAoidh / Peter Mackay, Peter McCarey, Jeda Pearl, Richard Price, John Purser, Samuel Reilly, Alan Riach, Stewart Sanderson Ian Stephen, Em Strang & Samuel Tongue.

Pick up your copy here:

https://stewedrhubarb.org/product/hunters-voices-edited-by-alan-riach/

Background is Judith Collins' PAOLOZZI.