Latest Releases: Holy & Intoxicated Publications (2022-2023)

pete donohue: new midnight sky (2023) Front cover John D. Robinson

 

There is a great variety of poems amongst the 15 in this chap by the UK poet Pete Donohue. In the opening titled poem, ‘new midnight sky’ Donohue creatively humps the alphabet through an enlivened statue to reveal a sense of hope at the bottom of his spun-out barrel:

 

new midnight sky

 

one illuminated evening

this statue sheds its stasis

becomes alive again

for reasons only known

to herself

bending burnt spoons

between those bony thighs

into impossible re-use

like rusting cars crushed

at the local breaker’s yard

she crunches up syringes

with rotten gappy teeth

behind thin blooded lips

& spits out fragile shards

to form nascent stars of hope

surrounding a gibbous moon

the frolicking humpback mother

spread out across the canopy

as warm protective blanket

in her new midnight sky.

 

I dig best Donohue’s cast of wayward souls represented in his character poems. The personified ‘erotic wine’ bottle is a classic study in minimalism.Cheerful too is ‘stylish annabella’:

 

she wears tight woollen dresses

hair shirts in black

never any underwear

between those & skin

 

sharing every outline

of bony flesh

to the judgemental

naked to all

 

Best in the collection is perhaps ‘psychobilly baby’. I like how Donohue telescopes time and compresses images in this tragic, character study:

 

psychobilly baby

 

he never smoked hash with us

told us he didn’t like the way

it made him feel

or think

said he had a small habit

with smack

but was on top of it

his mother & sister

died in a car crash

when he was younger

he wouldn’t speak about it

we admired his drape jackets

& the way he walked through the night

all over london

loaded up on speed

he printed a mean silkscreen

fashioned wax in a candle shop

when we eventually found him

in his shepherd’s bush basement

he had been dead three days

the needle limp in his arm

i lit one of his candles.

 

Gwil James Thomas: Gold Chains Around Our Necks, Hellhounds At Our Heels (2022) 22 pages

 Thomas lives in Bristol but some of his best work draws on his years in Spain. There are 20 poems in this chap, including 3 haikus, some of which have previously appeared in small, alternative publications such as Terror House Magazine, Rye The Whiskey Review, Expat Press, The Bees Are Dead and others.  His poetry characteristically is free verse, narrative and confessional in style. These are honest, original one-off poems, wrought out of the beautiful but sometimes fucked up cauldron we call life.

 

Here are two of my favourites from the collection. Posted with the permission of the publisher. Click to enlarge:

Gwil James Thomas is a novelist, poet and inept musician. He lives in his hometown of Bristol, England but has also lived in London, Brighton and Spain. He has twice been nominated for The Best of The Net and once for The Pushcart Prize. He has worked as a labourer, a chef, an aeroplane cleaner, a product sales demonstrator, a freelance writer, a dishwasher and a news article archivist. In 2022 he also published two other poetry chapbooks - Part English, Part Welsh, Part Wolf (Scumbag Press) and The Labourer Poems (Hickathrift Press). He plans to one day build a house amongst other things.

 

  

 

The Woman Who Loved Floppy Hats (14 pages) 

John D. Robinson (words) & Danny D. Ford (illustrations)

 

This is a hilarious, explicit romp into a young woman’s bedroom antics and her peculiar sexual hat fetish. The story is clearly told and unfolds in an interesting and highly entertaining way.

 

Danny D. Ford’s four illustrations add humour and bonk to Robinson’s inventive frolic. 

 

The short story first appeared in the e-zine ‘Horror Sleaze Trash’ and was later published in Robinson’s collection The Dirty Sacrifice & Other Stories (Alien Buddha Press, 2021).

 

The story begins simply and graphically and entices the reader to continue:

 

Loretta Blissful was a very attractive and sexy twenty-seven-year-old and had an untamed and insatiable appetite for the opposite sex. She had been married and divorced nine times; a commitment to just one man was impossible for her. 

One man was never enough. 

Loretta liked to think of herself as a sexual vampire with an unquenchable thirst for cock. No matter how deeply Loretta’s love for each of her nine husbands, she could simply not resist the urge, the opportunities, the lust to pursue other men for sexual conquests and adventures. She simply could not help herself; her passion was her demon and she loved her demon well.

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