The Rattle Ekphrastic Results are out! Thank you so much, Rattle, for choosing my work your Ekphrastic Challenge this February. If you have a minute at all, do go and look at Mary Meriam’s beautiful ghazal, ‘Homemaker’., which was my favourite for the Ekphrastic challenge this February. It is an honour that Mary. wrote this poem to the image. I love how it takes on a life completely and entirely of its own.

I also deeply admire the craft in the poem. The ghazal’s repeating words work so well together, and the way that the images read connected and disconnected simultaneously.

One of my favourite writers is the geographer Doreen Massey, who writes of space as simultaneous and multiplicitous stories-so-far. When I read Mary’s poem, I can see the stories branching out and intersecting, like magic.

The hardest thing, though, was choosing this poem as my favourite – all the shortlisted poems were amazing. I’ve had a couple of poets share their work with me and I’m hoping to post them on here as I’m so honoured that people wrote such glorious work in response to the image.

And, thinking of theatrical images, I’ve posted my tiny giveaway for this month (a little tri-fold sample of a paper theatre, complete with found text – two vintage book texts and some stickers – for people to snip up and make a surrealist poem from (to go with the theatre).

A kind of embodied, tangible, more constrained ekphrastic? Either way, I’m excited to find out what my fellow poets and artists come up with.