Sarah James

Biography

Sarah James is a widely-published and award-winning journalist, fiction writer and poet, whose first poetry collection, 'Into the Yell' (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2010), won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011. Her second, 'Be[yond]', is published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press (July 2013). The University of Oxford modern languages graduate has been placed in numerous competitions and published in magazines and anthologies including The Rialto, Magma, Poetry News, under the radar, Ink Sweat and Tears, Sculpted: Poetry of the North-West, A Complicated Way of Being Ignored: The Grist anthology of the best poetry of 2012 and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam. Sarah was twice shortlisted for Worcestershire Poet Laureate, has been a guest poet at numerous festival and spoken word events, including reading alongside Bernard O'Donoghue at Cheltenham Poetry Festival 2013 and performing as part at Ledbury Poetry Festival 2013. She has been chosen for the 2013 Coventry-Cork O'Bheal twin city poets exchange and has poems on the Polesworth Poets’ Trail in Warwickshire, a café wall mural and Worcestershire buses. Other writing roles have included organising festival live lit events, writer in residence at Worcester Oxfam Bookshop and leading creative writing workshops. Sarah is currently in the final year of an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and enjoys collaborations, mixing artforms and poetryfilm. Currently based in Worcestershire, she runs the Poetry Society’s Worcestershire Stanza and is secretary of Droitwich Arts Network. Her website is at www.sarah-james.co.uk and she is a poetry editor at V. Press (http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.co.uk/p/about.html).

Samples

The (un)bespoken Every whisper betrays its doppelgangers – the caves of like mouths, where strange tongues’ shadows fall and rise in a nerve-string puppetry. That rushed escape of caught breath on the moor, this shush of gorse wind, their splash of loosed water on stone, gravity in torrents, laughter shaken from a petal. Life’s repetitive looping: sounds, senses, symbioses; that spiralling slippage between initial pulse – swifter than wind, Iris-coloured – and that synaptic spark crackle. Each I love you, I’m sorry, Not again! different and yet the same, just as new spokes spin thin air and cold metal, or light unsilences old oil in a rainbow against water. Sarah James (Created as part of the Manchester Metropolitan University/Royal Philharmonic Society ‘Notes into Letters’ project and published in 'Be[yond]', Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2013) Betrayal An empty can grows two ring-pulls in the train window, poised open-winged in a parallel world. There too, the gap left by a metal tongue pushed down. Into this thin-silvered darkness: dried flesh, taste of stale fizz, tide-marked lips – that waking to the red of a known mouth to find another’s echo has crawled in, embedded its forked hiss into numbed silence. Sarah James (First published in 'Abridged' magazine, then Be[yond], Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2013) Quarrying at Savage Hill Stand away from the window – you will not see her moving through the long grass to rest a hand on her quarry slab: monument against Grandad’s 'God damn her,' and 'What the hell d’ you wan that fer?' This was her garden, there is her stone, here, finches in her fig tree. Buttercups crow from the lawn, daisies scatter, unmown. Draw the curtains closed, shut out this dust-laden light. Limestone strengthens your spine, her presence weaves within you. Sarah James (From Be[yond], Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2013)

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.