Hilary Menos

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In those days, robbery was my form of love – The Friday Poem

Jan 16, 2025 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

SacrificeOpening the cardboard box that had helda long winter coat for my mother out of the catalogue,the ash-frail rows, arranged in sawdust,from bough-cleft, twig-fork, thorn-bush, tussock,were flooded with sterile day in their angular nest.
Chestnut ribbon of speed – The Friday Poem

Jan 9, 2025 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

Topping and tailing blackcurrants at the back window– the window wide and the evening scent of lilies. Some small creature struggling along the stonesin the heat, rolls over – a huge beetle? Binoculars:the drunken creature ducks under the doorstep,rushes out, rolls again – it’s a bee,a queen hypnorum, bright orange thorax doubledby the matching small male on her back she’strying everything to throw off.
And blue things - The Friday Poem

Dec 5, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

[…] But I learned that it’spossible for a sentence to have no words. That the meaning ofa word can exist without the word. That life can still occurwithout a mind. That emptiness still swarms without theworld. That it can be disconnected from the wall and stilllight up. [‘With My Back to the World, 1997’, p. 3]Nelson: This definitely does it for Alycia Pirmohamed, one of the Forward Prize judges, who warmly praised it before Victoria Chang’s reading at the Forward Prizes event. What do you think?
The wheeling Maybirds – The Friday Poem

Nov 21, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

WOLF SONGi.m. Eavan BolandSit still now. Take up your pen. In this space before noise beginstigers are visiting citiesand a white leopard sitson a lawn in Suburbia. A wolf is walking alongan empty beach in California. A poet sings his traces. Now she too is becoming history. Already the first slow movementof the strings is parting the silence. This is the point in the storywhen shadows thin as bladesquiver in the April air. You can see the wolf through them.
A tutti-frutti cigarillo wrap stuffed with Alaskan Thunderfuck – The Friday Poem

Nov 14, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

Belphégor, Lord of the Gap, Hell’s Ambassador to FranceBradypus variegates, the brown-throated three-toed sloth,is surely the laziest bastard in the South American jungle. Once a week, she climbs down from the high canopyinto the O horizon, where she takes a shite on the detritus. This is dangerous, as there are jaguars there, and yourselves. Is the brown-throated three-toed sloth afraid? Is she fuck. You would cootchie-woo cootchie-wootchie-coo any sloth. So would I.
Let us venerate niche and otherness – The Friday Poem

Nov 7, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

Stand in Late MayTake this manky ditch off the Yare,this heat-stink of algae blooming –what with all the ploughing to the margins,abstraction of water, and run-offinto the marshes, there’s such choked chances. But in and about this scrutty reed,here at least, a rhizal stand of yellow flag again. Broadsword stems, forged from the sunk underblades that splay to these blazing iris tongues,each with the little zag of their nectar guide. What’s to be done but keep going? The world is in such increments.
An 18th-Century Genius in Bondage – The Friday Poem

Oct 31, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

The African-American poet Phillis Wheatley has achieved iconic status in American culture. A 174-word letter from her to a fellow servant of African descent in 1776 sold at auction in 2005 for $253,000, well over double what it had been expected to fetch, and the highest price ever paid for a letter by a woman of African descent. Elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the United States bear her name. A prominent statue in Boston memorializes her.
Latte-coloured cannonbirds – The Friday Poem

Oct 24, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

David Nash is a new poet to me – perhaps unsurprisingly, as the cover of his book says he “lives between Co. Cork and Chile” and the poems in this, his first collection, were written “returning for the first time in more than a decade”. Between the covers are four dozen poems as lively and various as any I’ve read in a good while.
The good way home – The Friday Poem

Oct 24, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

Popular Song, the debut collection from Harry Man, draws inspiration from more diverse sources than most poetry books, and its remarkably broad thematic range is matched by a high degree of stylistic variation.
The point-blankness of space – The Friday Poem

Oct 10, 2024 | thefridaypoem.com | Hilary Menos

American Anthem is a timely, savage critique of America today. In this searing work, Michels calls out the policy-makers and pharmaceutical corporations for their cynical neglect of the American populus. Her fury spirals out of her own traumatic childhood and the shock of her mother’s death by overdose. The book is full of bones: from a burnt out body in a dumpster, to her brothers’ knuckles in a fist fight.