JAMIKA AJALON
A disciple of the creative, I am inter-disciplinary artist who works with different mediums independently, but also in multiple fusions- incorporating written and spoken text, sound/music, and visuals. A nomad, I grew up in america but have lived for years in europe, including England, and France. During travels (including countries in Africa) I have met and collaborated with other artists, academics, who who challenge ‘frontiers’ (external borders as well as internalised) and are planting seeds. A science fiction nerd, I have always looked at ‘space’ as a place to realise and talk about possible futures. My publications and performances have been diverse. They include a series of audio-visual anti-lectures which explore memory, and nomadic subjectivity through a “afro-
futurist” lens. As I roam I have had the good fortune to perform, record, tour , publish and exhibit/ screen my work inVienna, London, Berlin, South Africa, Senegal, Kampala, Paris…
As we move, we leave
memory seeds behind.
These seeds fall in
unsuspecting places
later creating spon-
taneous ‘Settlements’ of
resistance
https://www.facebook.com/jamikaajalon.artistpage
MICHAEL LEE RATTIGAN
Michael Lee Rattigan has lived and taught in Mexico and Spain, and translated the complete collection of Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro poems (Rufus Books, 2007). More translations have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote Magazine, The Black Herald, The Fiend Journal, and in Selected Writings of César Vallejo (edited by Joseph Mulligan, Wesleyan University Press, 2015). His first poetry collection, Liminal, was published in 2012 (Rufus Books). His latest collection, Hiraeth, was published alongside its French translation in 2016 (Black Herald Press).
https://blackheraldpress.wordpress.com/books/hiraeth/
Ambrosial
chrysalis-broken light through morning sky’s
complete abstract image speaks as we speak
with living sound just born waking
to each other
shore’s withered stalk against blackness hung
known as open air we walked in
beyond italic sea’s endurance flown memory
on other voices more deeply human
than you or i
© Michael Lee Rattigan
(From Hiraeth, Black Herald Press, 2016)
PAUL STUBBS
Paul Stubbs is the author of three poetry collections published in Great-Britain – The Theological Museum (Flambard, 2005), The Icon Maker (Arc, 2008), and The End of the Trial of Man (Arc, 2015) – and of two long poems, Ex Nihilo and Flesh (Black Herald Press, 2010 & 2013). His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, including The Bitter Oleander, The High Window, Poetry Review, The Shop, and the French literary magazines Les Carnets d’Eucharis and Nunc. In the past, he was invited to read his poems at Oxford University, at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, and in New York. He is also the author of a book of essays on Arthur Rimbaud, The Carbonized Earth; another book of poetical essays, The Return to Silence, will be released in December 2016. His forthcoming collection, The Lost Songs of Gravity, is partly based on the religious writings of Simone Weil.
http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8WVShkJPcI
The End of the Trial of Man
after ‘Blood on the Floor’ by Francis Bacon, 1981
‘Man is a beast of prey’ — Oswald Spengler
Upon these floorboards, amid the blood and
the death-throes of gods, the ‘rough beast’ has
eaten its last, has eaten and spat out man’s rib;
eaten and spat and stamped
down its feet onto the now crushed and un-
recognizable face-mask of Yeats:
one mile outside
of Bethlehem…
© Paul Stubbs
(from The End of the Trial of Man, Arc Publications, 2015)
