No Matter #10 at Gullivers

No Matter at Gullivers, Manchester, 11 December 2019, free entry

Following a brief visit last time round to Salford’s King’s Arms (featuring an onstage real-life cat), and some involvement in the second outing of the two-day Poetry Emergency: A Northwest Radical Poetry Festival, the No Matter crew – Jazz Linklater, Nell Osborne and Hilary White – are back in the Northern Quarter with their bi-monthly poetry reading series, this time at Gullivers.

Taking us into double figures and marking their last event of 2019 – and Christmas / night before election party – No Matter #10 will feature readings from Rachael Allen and Daisy Lafarge, plus a new commission by headliner Jade Montserrat. Jade is one of six performers to benefit from the special New Matter commissions organised since April by No Matter using Arts Council England funding, alongside the likes of Anne Boyer, Lisa Robertson and Verity Spott – or, as No Matter said when they received the award, “some of our irl favourite living poets and artists”.

Jade is a UK-based research-led artist and writer, who works at the intersections of art and activism, progressing through performance and live art, works on paper and interdisciplinary projects. Think performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text… After studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she completed a Masters at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and she is now undertaking a PhD related to artistic work from the black diasporic perspective in the North of England at the University of Central Lancashire’s School of Art, Design and Performance. She has shown work at Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery and the Bluecoat in Liverpool, and she has previously completed a Residency at Metal in Southend.

Jade is one of six performers to benefit from the special New Matter commissions organised since April by No Matter using Arts Council England funding

Rachael Allen is poetry editor and the former online editor for Granta. She is co-editor of poetry anthology series Clinic and online journal Tender. Her first pamphlet of poems was published by Faber as part of the Faber New Poets series and her debut collection, Kingdomland, came out with Faber earlier this year. Born in Cornwall, she studied English Literature at Goldsmiths College and she is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Award.

Rachael is linked to the third reader having been part of the team from Granta Books that “snapped up the debut poetry collection and debut novel of Betty Trask and Eric Gregory award-winning poet and writer Daisy Lafarge” (The Bookseller). Rachael says: “Daisy’s poetry is inimitably original. This startling collection ranges with precision and control through ecology, feminism and animals; romance and relationships are considered through the pipework at CERN, and through toxic airs and lakes. Her language is extraordinarily alive to what it means to think, feel and love on a vulnerable earth. Combining a dense cosmic spirituality with a ruthless reality, this is an urgent, intellectual and gripping collection of poems.”

Daisy Lafarge lives in Glasgow and works across poetry, fiction, criticism, theory and visual art. She is an editor at MAP and a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. Her debut poetry pamphlet, understudies for air, was published by Sad Press in August 2017. Granta will publish her collection, Vida, next November and novel Paul – which won a Betty Trask Award in its unpublished form – in summer 2021.