Chemistry at The Chemic

Leeds live literature regular Chemistry offers an exciting mix of open mic acts and invited poets – this month the headliners are Emily Zobel Marshall and Harry Man.

Leeds-based Emily Zobel Marshall’s debut collection, Bath of Herbs, recently out with Peepal Tree Press, is described as  “beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful”. Having spent her childhood in a remote village in the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales with her Black Caribbean mother and white English father, her poems explore the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to nature and the English and Welsh fells, rivers and shorelines from an ‘othered’, unmappable, positionality. Bath of Herbs (a reference to her grandmother bathing her mother) honours the lives of Black and Brown women and asks how they can reclaim space, both practically and conceptually. It also revisits the confusing world of childhood; the inexplicable actions of adults and the bullies who despise perceived difference. She also nods to a writerly inheritance handed down from her grandfather, the Black Martiniquan writer Joseph Zobel, contrasting his Black peasant world and the security of a middle-class life – but also how that world can be broken apart by death, illness and fear.

Malika Booker calls the collection “delicate lyric poems” and says “Emily Zobel Marshall interweaves a rich tapestry”, while Jason Allen-Paisant – winner of both the 2023 TS Eliot Prize and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection – says: “In this beautiful and moving debut collection, the death of a mother leads to profound encounters with the natural world in poems about curative plants, maternal care, and hiking and swimming in the epic outdoors. But heart-wrenching loss leads to transformations of the self, as reflections on mother, grandmother, and their world of care, embodied in the bath of herbs, give the poet the permission to fiercely embrace her complex racial identity and defiantly resist easy categorisations in this absorbing lyrical reel.”

Joining Emily Zobel Marshall is award-winning poet, playwright and translator Harry Man, whose first collection Popular Song was published by Nine Arches Press earlier this year. His first pamphlet, Lift, won the Unesco Bridges of Struga award and was shortlisted for a Best Poetry Pamphlet Saboteur award. Together with artist Sophie Gainsley, he wrote Finders Keepers (Sidekick Books, 2016), a combination of poems and illustrations on endangered species that was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes award for New Work in Poetry and a Saboteur award for Best Collaborative Work. Deretter (‘Thereafter’) a book of concrete elegies written in collaboration with the Norwegian poet Endre Ruset included two poems that won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was published as a pamphlet as Utøya Thereafter (Hercules Editions, 2021). His translation of Endre Ruset’s Noriaki is published by Broken Sleep Books. His work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, he is Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne 2022-2025, and he has appeared at the European Poetry Festival.

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 P for Phosphorus (venue The Chemic is named after Johnstons Chemical Works, hence why Chemistry is themed on the 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.”