No Matter #4 at The Castle

The No Matter posse – Jazz Linklater, Nell Osborne and Hilary White – are back at The Castle for the fourth of their bi-monthly poetry reading series; this time round promising ‘your winter wonderland magical Christmas cheer treat’. Featuring three headliners, Emma Bolland, Nia Davies and Rebecca Tamás, that book table is going to be groaning – bring your jukebox money and up your avant-garde gift-giving game this Christmas.

We’ll turn first to Nia Davies, undertaking practice-based research at the University of Salford and recently busy co-producing November’s two-day Poetry Emergency: A Northwest Radical Poetry Festival alongside Joey Francis, from Saturday-afternoon reading series Peter Barlow’s Cigarette, which will be back in the new year. A frequent collaborator with other writers and artists, in 2015 Nia joined forces with The Enemies Project’s SJ Fowler to co-curate Gelynion, a Welsh Enemies Project, bringing together contemporary and experimental poets from Wales to perform to sell-out spaces in Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, Hay-on-Wye, Newport, Swansea and London. She has been editor of Poetry Wales magazine since 2014, and her own poems and essays have been published and translated widely and she has appeared at several international festivals. Her pamphlets – Then Spree (Salt, 2012), Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Boiled String, 2016) and England (Crater, 2017) – were followed by her first full-length collection, All Fours. Published by Bloodaxe Books, it was shortlisted for the Literature Wales Roland Mathias Poetry Award earlier this year and her latest, Interversions, followed hot on its heels.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer who describes her practice as ‘hybrid’ and works across areas including autofiction, experimental screenwriting, expanded translation, performance and moving image. Her next publication, Over, In, and Under, includes a ‘psychotic’ prose-poem translation of a Freud essay, and is coming out in early 2019 with Manchester-based indie publisher (and organisers of the Manchester Independent Books and Art Fair) Dostoyevsky Wannabe. She is the 2019 #Interrupteur artist-writer in residence for the University of Sheffield’s School of Arts and Humanities, which will see her facilitating a space during February, March and early April for writing, speaking, reading, text-based performance and installation, ‘and other interventionist surprises’.

Last year, Rebecca Tamás’ poetry pamphlet Savage came out with Clinic Press and was joint London Review Bookshop pamphlet of the year, and a Poetry School book of the year. She is co-editor, with Sarah Shin, of Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century, an anthology of UK and US work that just came out on brand-new press Ignota featuring work by tonight’s guest Nia and other Northern Quarter performers Vahni Capildeo and Nisha Ramayya (oh, and Ursula K Le Guin, no less). Rebecca’s first full collection, WITCH, will be published by Penned in the Margins next year and has been selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for spring 2019, so expect a sneak peek of some of those pieces.