Novel Niche

Novel Niche Q***r & Transgressive Close Readings from the Ungovernable & Dangerous Margins.

I've dreamed of Guernica. Now, two of my poems live there. I give thanks to the wildly generous for including "Witch In...
20/02/2026

I've dreamed of Guernica. Now, two of my poems live there.

I give thanks to the wildly generous for including "Witch Industry" and "Sc******ng in the Tropics" in the January/February 2026 issue of . Thank you, too, to and the wider Guernica editorial team, for handling the work with such care. I'm thankful to the visionary artworks of and accompanying the poems. A fourth, particular gratitude to and : both these poems were written in the expansive, tender space they enabled during their January Writing Hours last year.

These poems will both appear in Witch Hindu (2027). They are relentless inhabitants on the border of the most dangerous, the most wild, the most reckless things of which I'm capable on the page. I'm trying to see how much further I can go.

Read "Witch Industry" here: https://www.guernicamag.com/witch-industry/

Read "Sc******ng in the Tropics" here: https://www.guernicamag.com/scissoring-in-the-tropics/

October is here! Three months remain in your yearly reading ledger; what book are you most excited to devour next?For 's...
01/10/2025

October is here! Three months remain in your yearly reading ledger; what book are you most excited to devour next?

For 's September/October 2025 issue, I highlight:

• A House for Miss Pauline, by ()
• The , by Anu Lakhan (Argotiers Press)
• Between Islands, by ()
• We Were Not Kings by ()

Find them at the Caribbean Beat website:
https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-190/book-buzz-reviews-sep-oct-2025

or on page 32 in the beautiful flipbook, here:
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/70723278/caribbean-beat-september-october-2025-190

Remember, reading the Caribbean means you read the world.

Are you ready to writeangry poems / incandescently q***r poems / oh-god-the-world's-on-fire poems / poems about whalefal...
20/09/2025

Are you ready to write

angry poems / incandescently q***r poems / oh-god-the-world's-on-fire poems / poems about whalefall in the deepest part of the ocean / poems about two girls kissing in the rain / quiet poems daring to speak into the abyss / bottom-of-the-cupboard-secret poems / poems illegal in at least 27 countries / poems illegal in your own country / visa-free-travel poems / triumphant poems with bruised jaws / sleepy-full-of-cake poems because not every poem's gotta rage / totally unhinged poems you don't think your grandmother would be pleased to know / poems about your totally unhinged grandmother that would delight the f**k out of her?

Then please join me. Over the next three weeks, I'm teaching these two courses, and I would love your company, wherever in the world you are. (If you're having trouble choosing an offering, I made the final carousel slide just for you.)

1️⃣ arvon__ Masterclass: Defying Binaries in Your Poems
Embracing your unique voice on Bi visibility day
Via Zoom Webinar
featuring the poems of , ,

Tuesday September 23rd 2025, 19:00-21:00 BST / 14:00-16:00 AST
£40 / Concessions £20 / Limited Number of Fully-Funded Spots Available
≈ $54 USD / Concessions $27 USD
≈ $360 TTD / Concessions $180 TTD

https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/masterclass-exploring-and-celebrating-bi-poetry/

2️⃣ thewritingschoolonline Two-Part Workshop: Sundays September 28 + October 5, 2025 / 14:00-16:00 BST / 9:00-11:00 AST
£27.50 / ≈ $250 TTD / ≈ $37 USD
Via Zoom
featuring the poems of , ,

https://thewritingschool.co.uk/unstopper-the-unsayable-writing-tough-truths-in-poems

DM me if you've got any questions. I hope you have exactly the poems you need for your own radical survival.

"I learn what survives best is buried. What is buried continues to surface."from "The Palatine Hill"On my 39th birthday,...
19/08/2025

"I learn what survives best is buried. What is buried continues to surface."

from "The Palatine Hill"

On my 39th birthday, I am with 's Agrippina the Younger (), a book I knew I would read on this day of . These poems renew my belief in myth: not that they exist, because I've always known that, but that we have been myth, ourselves, and so often, it is the ghosts of our former selves that haunt us.

Happy haunting, everyone.

Presenting: Novel Niche's 2025 list of 31 Caribbean Books of Poetry for The Sealey Challenge.So many of these books and ...
01/08/2025

Presenting: Novel Niche's 2025 list of 31 Caribbean Books of Poetry for The Sealey Challenge.

So many of these books and their writers have shown me the way. Have instructed and enthralled, compelled and startled me. Have led me to poets, places, politics and all manner of things I would not have known otherwise. If you are new to Caribbean poems, or a seasoned reader, I hope this list is a good companion to you.

It's only a beginning, an opening note in the vast and cavernous expanse of what our poems can do, and have done. Please add your own books to the conversation: the ones you've admired, the ones you recommend, the ones you've written.

I know it feels insurmountable, just the now. That poems are no antidote for the world. I don't expect them to be. I know they will continue helping me, though: a hand in the darkness, or the dear, delicious darkness itself, piercing as a blade, juicy as an in-season zaboca, sharp like saltwater, bitter like cerasse, splendoured like Carnival. I hope the poems you read during this year's Sealey Challenge bring you what you need. I hope some of them are Caribbean: our voices are waiting to meet you, if you have never known them... and if you know us, and are us, then welcome, always, home.

Remember, reading the Caribbean means you read the world.

See the full list of 31 titles in the comments below.




Beti by the seawall.
06/07/2025

Beti by the seawall.

Welcome to the second half of the year! What has been your favourite book of 2025?For 's July/August 2025 issue, I highl...
01/07/2025

Welcome to the second half of the year! What has been your favourite book of 2025?

For 's July/August 2025 issue, I highlight:

• Village Weavers, by ()
• Some of Us Can Go Back Home, by .graham ()
• An Ordinary Landscape of Violence, by Preity R. Kumar ()
• Ibis, by ()

Find them at the Caribbean Beat website (link in bio) or on page 32 of the beautiful flipbook, here:
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/70628753/caribbean-beat-july-august-2025-189

Remember, reading the Caribbean means you read the world.

Goodbye, Saturdays at !I've worked the weekend register at Paper Based Bookshop for many, many years now, and it's time ...
25/06/2025

Goodbye, Saturdays at !

I've worked the weekend register at Paper Based Bookshop for many, many years now, and it's time to bid this part of my bookseller's duties adieu, as I reclaim more time for my own writing.

The bookshop has been a constant companion, a cozy friend, a familiar space. It's held me in more ways than one. I've had such inspiring connections here, met so many wonderful, curious, quirky people, enthused about Caribbean books with friends and strangers, and, of course, read widely and deeply. It'll be tough to give this up, but my own books-in-waiting need me.

I'm still very much a member of Team Paper Based, even though you won't see me as much. Know I'm working behind the scenes to help keep bringing powerful, transformative titles to you. This little, remarkable indie bookshop has given me so much, and l'll be of service to it, and all of you, for as long as I can.

Remember, reading the Caribbean means you read the world-- and long live Paper Based!

, thank you for the radical imagination of possibility. For the seer work. For the dream work. For the seed archive. For...
21/06/2025

, thank you for the radical imagination of possibility. For the seer work. For the dream work. For the seed archive. For picturing us, within then wildly outside of the frames we have inherited. For the replenishing reminder that the collective Indo-Caribbean legacy is not the sole repository or possession of Indo-Caribbean people. For knowing and standing in the truth that the more we relinquish purism, casteism and binaries, the more legacy we sow. Richer. Wilder. More.

I think a foremother of my ancestry, standing in a field with a cutlass in her hand, could have dreamed of a future like this one.

For 's May/June 2025 issue, I highlight:• The Believers: Stories, by .k.herman ()• Kipling Plass, by Berkley Wendell Sem...
14/05/2025

For 's May/June 2025 issue, I highlight:

• The Believers: Stories, by .k.herman ()
• Kipling Plass, by Berkley Wendell Semple ()
• Mother Island, by ()
• Isolario/Islarium, by ()

Find them at the Caribbean Beat website (link in bio) or on page 29 of the beautiful flipbook, here:
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/70349332/caribbean-beat-may-june-2025-188

Remember, reading the Caribbean means you read the world.

An editor's role is a position of trust. I was honoured to co-edit two anthologies published by Peekash Press this year:...
08/05/2025

An editor's role is a position of trust.

I was honoured to co-edit two anthologies published by Peekash Press this year: alongside Lucy Evans, Unstitching Silence: Fiction and poetry by Caribbean writers on gender-based violence, and alongside Diana McCaulay, Writing For Our Lives: A Caribbean climate justice anthology.

Editorial work is intricate and precise. You work with what's in front of you, yes, and beyond that, too: to the ultimate strengths of what you, and the writer, imagine this work can be, jointly. It is a careful enterprise, and at its core, it must be a caring one, else it is deficient. I worked to the limits of what I felt myself capable, in both these books. It's my hope that I surpassed those markers, too. An editor must try, always, to bring better than her best self to the manuscript -- all her rigour, all her mettle, all her skill and research, integrity and vision, heart and craft. And then bring more of herself with each new reading.

My name may be on the front covers of both books, but it is the writers who are their hearts. I am profoundly grateful to each of them:

Unstitching Silence

Christine Barrow
Sara Bastian
Neala Luna Bhagwansingh ()
kevanté ac cash ()
Courtney Conrad ()
Kevin Jared Hosein ()
karen lee ()
Caroline Mackenzie ()
Tanicia Pratt ()
Dwight Thompson

Writing For Our Lives

Randy Ablack
Brendon Alekseii ()
Tadzio Bervoets ()
Anika M. Christopher ()
Sonia Farmer (.farmer.files)
Kevin Jared Hosein
Dreylan Johnson ()
Elton Johnson
Rhys Knowles ()
Simone Leid
Amanda T. McIntyre ()
Judy Raymond ()
Christina Katrina Smith ()
Portia Subran (.art)
Sharma Taylor
Charlie Godet Thomas ()
Scott Ting-A-Kee ()
Nadine Tomlinson

I looked at most things through loss and gratitude at this year's festival. Fifteen years is both a long and short time ...
06/05/2025

I looked at most things through loss and gratitude at this year's festival.

Fifteen years is both a long and short time to be doing this work with and for the Bocas Lit Fest. I missed our deceased comrade, Funso Aiyejina, in ways I both expected, and ways that hurt and alarmed me. But what is that pain, that panic in the chest, that wet-eyed tremor, if not the very application of love made manifest? Love, fighting for what it deserves from me. From you. From us.

I felt Funso with us, dead but not gone, in so many panel discussions, casual conversations, snippets of sound, voices of other writers on and off stage. I leaned into the cycles of living and dying that are always with us, whether we are working at a lit fest or surviving a war zone. I wore my Palestinian watermelon pin every single day. What a privilege, I thought, every time I stepped into the Old Fire Station. What an honour, I felt, racing down the stairs to the AV Room. What wild luxury, I knew, to be standing and monitoring and breathing with my yellow clipboard and my pink sneakers. Alive. Alive. Alive.

Impossible, always, to calculate every moment of joy the Bocas Lit Fest gave me this. So many of it resides in the pages you see here, and other books I have not yet had autographed. The truth is, a war could come to us any day. What will it find when it peels back our securities? What words from the poets and playwrights, the essayists and biographers, the novelists and short storytellers, will we have inscribed in our own blood, when the danger locates us?

If you do not know, that's alright. You and I may find them together, in the very next Caribbean book we are fortunate to hold.

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