Chemistry at The Chemic

Leeds live literature regular Chemistry offers an exciting mix of open mic acts and invited poets – this month for Chemistry 19, the headliners are Helen Ivory and Luke Samuel Yates.

Renowned Bloodaxe poet Helen Ivory’s latest book – her sixth collection – is Constructing a Witch, which was published in October 2024 and is a PBS Winter Recommendation. It focuses in on the monstering and othering of women, and the fear of ageing femininity. Her fifth Bloodaxe Books collection, The Anatomical Venus was short-listed for the East Anglian Book Awards (2019) and won the East Anglian Writers ‘By the Cover’ Award (EABA 2019). Other books include Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), which won the 2016 Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work, Hear What the Moon Told Me, a book of collage/mixed media/acrylic painted poems published in 2016 by Knives Forks and Spoons Press, a chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City, published in 2019 by SurVision, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems (2023), published in the US by MadHat Press. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat & Tears and teaches for Arvon and online for the National Centre for Writing Academy. She has won an Eric Gregory Award and in 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets. Helen Ivory is appearing at the upcoming Norwich leg of the touring European Poetry Festival (which will be back at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery on 6 July).

You may have caught Luke Samuel Yates a couple of years back (March 2023, to be exact – heck, time flies!) at Poets & Players in Manchester, where he lives. He’s since published his first full collection, Dynamo, which was a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2022. He has been Poetry Society Foyle Young Poet of the Year four times and he has three pamphlets to his name: The Flemish Primitives (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), The Pair of Scissors That Could Cut Anything (The Rialto, 2012) and Thinking Inside the Box, which was the result of a writing residency in the Philadelphia Institute of Advanced Study, culminating in him premiering the work from inside a large box. He has had work published by The Rialto, The North, Magma, Anthropocene and The Interpreter’s House, among others, as well as on the London Underground. He was a participant in the Jerwood Advanced Seminar in 2011 and was selected for the Aldeburgh Eight at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 2013. Originally from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, he studied English and Creative Writing at Warwick, then returned to the North West via Argentina. Now, as well as being a poet, he is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, teaching and researching political movements, protest, technology and consumption practices.

The guest poets will have books for sale, so bring your pocket money to help support their artistic endeavours!

If you want to sign up for a three-minute open mic slot, make yourself known to host and award-winning poet Joe Williams when you arrive – this month’s optional theme is element number 19, which is K for Potassium (venue The Chemic is named after Johnstons Chemical Works, hence why Chemistry is themed on the numbered elements of the periodic table). Readers are drawn in a random order from the “Box of Mystery”, and the open mic keeps going until the box is empty: “We welcome everyone from first-timers to veteran performers, so if you want to give it a go, please do.”