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Solitude. There it is, the word on its own, with its twisting s, lamenting o, lonely l, and a bit of attitude – part barrier, part bravado in the face of overwhelming circumstances. When we put out the call for submissions to the Solitude issue of Magma, with its focus on mental health, we were expecting many poems in response to the theme; a theme that – it’s safe to say – we have all experienced at some point in our lives, and never more so than during a global pandemic. We were right, receiving almost 5,000 poems.

Poems

Thembe Mvula A Story of Warmth
Kathryn Bevis Delinquent
Raymond Antrobus The Day I Pack My Stuff and Leave Home
Sophie Dumont Ghost Grandad
Kitty Donnelly Distances
Liam Bates On Their Radar

Articles

Magma 83 Editorial Solitude. There it is, the word on its own, with its twisting s, lamenting o, lonely l, and a bit of attitude – part barrier, part bravado in the face of overwhelming circumstances. When we put out the call for submissions to the Solitude issue of Magma, with its focus on mental health, we were…
Galloping Towards Delight: A Conversation with Kaveh Akbar Ilya Kaminsky: Let’s begin in the present: we are in the second year of pandemic. The themes of this issue of Magma – solitude and mental health – are very much on people’s minds. How to survive and stay sane (whatever sanity might mean to an individual) in such a moment. Do literatures (yes, there…
An excerpt from ‘Solitude as Translucence: Travelling the Intertidal Zone Between Present and Past Selves’ ‘Chalk’ is built around a tiny handful of memories from the summer I turned two, spent in and near my French grandmother’s clifftop house in Normandy, across the Channel from Worthing. Because I was so young, those memories feel as fragile and crushable as shells in shingle. But my hope was that, through being in…
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