Francesco Sani is a UK-based Italian writer. Fran’s poetry has appeared in Angel Exhaust, The Parcham Online, Operaia Rivista, Masticadores Taiwan, and The Morning Star. Fran is working on a collection of poetry on low-wage work in retail.

He Says: His favourite constellation is Ursa Major because it’s the only one he can recognise.

Karen Steiger is a poet and breast cancer survivor living in Schaumburg, Illinois. Her work has been published in The Wells Street Journal, Black Bough Poetry, Perhappened, Kaleidotrope, Rejection Letters, Versification, Sledgehammer Lit, Bombfire Lit, Lamp Lit, and others. Her debut collection, Clean Margins, has been published by Kelsay Books.

I’m sure this is unoriginal, but my favorite constellation is Orion because I love his diagonal belt. It’s very easy for me to find in the sky! I love the fuzziness of the nebula in his sword.

Women driving the Glasgow trams.
 
Only men could vote, afore the Great War,
‘Women’s place was in the home, before,
men did all the Corporation jobs,
“Girls doing skilled jobs? No way” say snobs.
 
Lady Snodgrass wrote in the Times,
“Women should stick to sowing hem lines”,
but as boys leave to fight on the front,
“We’ll have to use women,” councillor did grunt.
 
Tram firm said, “Were experimenting with two”,
“Fared better than expected – who knew!”
soon all the conductors were female,
Lady Snodgrass was turning pale.
 
“How can they hop upstairs on those things,
ankle length skirts and all that, that brings.”
Given skirts just below the knee,
and boots, so no ankles to see!
 
The war was consuming men by the hour,
women drivers trialled, Snodgrass was sour,
the girls passed with flying colours,
soon to be joined by many others.
 
Women were soon helping win the war,
filling shells with Nitro, by the score,
driving ambulances, milk lorries too,
buses, trains, even ‘boys’ in blue.
 
 
Flanders front line Doctors and Nurses,
Ammunition vans, even hearses,
negotiating tractors down on the farm,
city to land girls, bringing a bit o’ charm.
 
  
Lady Snodgrass never knew hard labour,
the Times no longer carried her favour,
the status of females got better of late,
they got the vote in 1928.

Geoff lowery did 30 years in the police. On retiring he wanted to form a boy band. He can't sing, cant play an instrument and his age may have been against him. So in 2019 joined the rest to write poetry club based in Doncaster. He will say he writes poems that are irreverent, poignant and often funny. He has written four poetry books. A sub title for one is - poems for people who don't like poetry. Pop his name in Amazon and take a look.

Judy Smith, lives in East Yorkshire. After a professional life in the health and education sectors she enjoys retirement following interests with family, gardening and developing her writing. She has been published in several anthologies. Paul, yesterday I looked out of my window at 3.40 am and through a gap in the clouds I saw Orion. That bright belt is like an anchor to hold onto through life so remains my favourite constellation

Emily Tee, originally from Northern Ireland, lives in the English Midlands. Emily's work has been included in a wide variety of places online and in print including recently The Ekphrastic Review and The Madrid Review.

Emily recently discovered one of her ancestors on her father's side was a Brown Seal Master in County Antrim in the 1780s, a Master Maker role that certified the quality of linen and marked it with a seal bearing their name and mark.


Favourite Constellation
My favourite constellation is The Plough, within Ursa Major. Although my late father was a farmer, he taught us it was called 'The Saucepan', in the same way that Cassiopeia was called 'The Big W' and those names have stuck with me..

Rob Cullen grew up on a council estate in the Rhondda, trained as an artist, art teacher, social worker. Rob worked in a steel works, construction sites, railways and psychiatric hospitals. Rob worked for forty years with working class kids who were damaged and damaging. Rob witnessed the transition of abused kids become drug users to self-medicate for their trauma and a system in denial of this causality. Rob is a published poet, and short story writer, he's written two novels. Rob is a gardener, environmentalist, poet, writer, artist.

Born and raised in a Scottish mining village, Isabel Miles is a scientist turned writer. Among others, Northwords Now, Dreich, The Alchemy Spoon, Green Ink Poetry and Acumen have published her work. She is author of one poetry pamphlet, Spent Earth and one collection, Tumbling through time, (both Mudfog Press).’

She Says: My favourite constellation is Orion because he never forgets to take his dog for a walk and because seeing him cheers me up throughout the winter.

Mark Corcoran grew up on a farm in the Dublin Mountains, with several siblings and an unreliable bus service. Gloucestershire-based since 2011, Yew Tree Press published his pamphlet, Some Invited Ghosts, in 2025. Poetry is a central concern of his, but it’s often relegated to the margins. Maybe that’s okay.

My favourite constellation is called the plough, I believe, but to me it’s always been a saucepan.

Elizabeth Cusack is a fifth generation Californian. In her first seventeen years, Elizabeth moved twelve times, to various states across America, towns and cities in The United Kingdom, and to Seoul in The Republic of South Korea. Elizabeth received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Colby-Sawyer College, New London, New Hampshire, followed by decades of working in the performing arts.

Elizabeth’s first book of poetry, Lovers Leap, published in 2024, is described as “a daring and imaginative narrative that re-envisions the life of Sappho, the iconic poetess of ancient Greece; Sappho’s story unfolds with haunting vulnerability and strength.” Elizabeth’s latest exploration of Sappho, Nothing But the Sea (2024), continues with prayerful entreaties for love, forgiveness, and solace, in a voice described as “ancient yet alive with passionate vibrancy.”

Elizabeth has published poems in Fevers of the Mind and Alien Buddha Press anthologies, and online with Fevers, Wombwell Rainbow, and Starbeck Orion, She posts poetry and videos on Facebook, X, Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Some of her social media appears under her trademark, Poetry on the Rocks for Lonely Hearts. Elizabeth resides in Southern California and Northern New Mexico.

https://elizabethcusackpoetryontherocks.org/

She Says: My favourite constellation is the Southern Cross. Nothing can compare to the privilege of being down under and the awe of looking up to see that enormous grand cross in the night sky; to experience that is to feel another reality. We are really on a globe and there is more than north, south, east and west. The journey of life for me is to seek another dimension.

Clarence Caddell is author of two collections from Bonfire Books. He edits The Borough: A Journal of Poetry.

Dora was born in Italy, emigrating with her family in 1966. Dora loves all of the arts. Unfortunately, working in the creative field was not to be. Now that she’s retired, she plans on spending her days creating as much art as possible.

She is a self-taught artist who draws and paints. She has also published a few short non-fiction pieces on the Threshold Short Story Forum, now archived. Additionally, she has won an honorable mention in the 79th Annual Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition.

Artworker Interview

Q:1. When and why did you start making artworks?

I showed no art aptitude when I was younger. At about 15 years old, I was looking out of my window and decided to sketch a tree on a whim. I loved the exercise so much and was delighted to see it was a good representation. Thereafter, I sketched everything I could, portraits were my favorite, and I also started dabbling in oils. I loved it so much that i decided to major in Art in college. Unfortunately, circumstances changed drastically: right before I was to start college on a schol scholarship my father died suddenly. My mother fell into a depression and things spiraled from there. I had to quit college before I was to graduate and moved out, as living at home became untenable.

My artistic dreams seemed to have died but that’s when I switched to writing and photography. I’m proud to say that I eventually returned to college to finish my degree in Art & English/ Communications. But by then, I was in a stable and lucrative job and needed to keep working. My artistic output consisted of drawing on computers with a mouse and doodling.

Q:2. Who introduced you to making artworks?

At first I was going to say no one but then I remember that around this time I started babysitting for a very glamorous and cosmopolitan couple who moved into our neighborhood. They both lived in Manhattan before moving to Brooklyn. She had been a teacher and her husband was an Art Director for a big Art agency. I would have to say they were the first ones to encourage me. In my family any artistic pursuit was discouraged as in their views, I was to get married and become a wife. That same couple also made it possible for me to practice on their piano as I also loved music and gave me their piano manuals to keep after I stopped babysitting for them. Unfortunately, I had to give that up too. I did learn to play the guitar as a guitar was much cheaper to buy than a piano, but my first love remains the piano.

I am so grateful they came into my life. The husband passed away, but I see his wife whenever I go back to my neighborhood.

My son just recently bought me a digital piano and now that I’ve retired, I’m starting to refresh my memory. The two songs I had learned to play before I stopped practicing was ‘Silent Night’ and the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. I’m not about to become a concert pianist by any means, but playing, in whatever capacity, brings me great joy.

My plate is certainly full with a house to take care of, but I’m getting to do all of the things I couldn’t do before.

Q:3. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older artworkers traditional and contemporary?

Having taken an Art History course as part of the curriculum, I was very aware of the greats and some have become very close to my heart. I also frequented Manhattan museums and saw so many great works of art, up close. I was lucky enough to visit Florence, specifically the Uffizi gallery. Also, having been born in Italy studied the greats in grammar school.

I love the Impressionists and post Impressionists like Degas, Monet, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, and Vincent Van Gogh. I also follow many contemporary artists like David Hockney for one, Lucian Frued and Jean-Michael Basquiat, to name a few.

Reviews Of Martin’s “Selected Poems”:

Review of A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends by Elaine Cusack, Write Out Loud

https://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=144750

Review of A Few More Sun Rises Yet Before It Ends, Nick Moss

https://www.culturematters.org.uk/roar/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTn-LBwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMEpmN2x0cGJQNE1wUER1R1JzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEesk7fACEKg-AkDRVnV5tnZnXLLFXSulgyIUgWttlNA1y6UrjKFRKS_CRgC5s_aem_aq9HcEyrju6uRViD9MYF5A

Review of A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends by Alan Morrison, Culture Matters

https://www.culturematters.org.uk/poetry-of-employment-a-review-of-a-few-more-sunrises-yet-before-it-ends-by-martin-hayes/

On My Radar article by Andrew McMillan, The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/19/andrew-mcmillan-poet-cultural-highlights-robyn-liberty-goosebumps

Poem: at the shipyard – published in The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/16/shipyard-martin-hayes-saturday-poem

Francesco Sani On Martin Hayes

Festschrift Interview

From “The Things Our Hands Once Stood For”

From “Unpublished”

Peter Knaggs On Martin Hayes

Festschrift Interview

Q:15. What inspires you to compare workers and bosses to animals like Moray eels and so on?

A limited imagination most probably. HA! I do like animals though, a lot. I’ve always had an affinity with them, partly because they just are what they are and do what they do. Their behaviour is driven by their nature rather than by some alternative reason they’ve invented for themselves. An animal can be cruel, or kind, or frightening, or funny, but it’s generally doing what its nature tells it to do. There isn’t usually all the human shit wrapped around it, all the explanations and justifications and excuses we seem to need for everything we do. So sometimes that makes them a very useful way of getting straight to an image.

I mean, if in a bit of writing you say, her song, lonely as a whale, then immediately you get this image in your mind of a whale solitary in the ocean, singing a haunting song about loss and loneliness. So you use the animal for the image. If, on the other hand, you start going into why this lady is feeling lonely and lost, singing out for somebody to hear her and come to her, and you have to explain all those emotions in a purely human context, then it starts getting all knotted up and messy and you’re twelve lines further down the page when you could have done it in two.

With the poem the moray eels you mention, that particular animal was used because I thought the supervisors resembled the moray eels’ hunting patterns very closely. Cave: Office. Mistake: Opportunity. Food: Power. Eat: Damage. The way they sit in their offices and every time they hear about something that’s gone wrong, shooting out and having a go at the controller or telephonist or courier or whoever was responsible, leaving no one in any doubt how fucking stupid and what a moron they thought that person was. This was nearly always acted out in front of everyone else, before retreating back into their little office to go back to poring over spreadsheets and reports, waiting for the next thing to go wrong so they could shoot out of their offices again and repeat the same humiliating process all over again. It was almost like this was their feeding time. And that reminded me very much of the moray eel.

That’s probably why I use animals quite a bit. Not just because they can give you an image quickly, but because sometimes the animal is actually a better way of understanding the behaviour of the human being than another human description would be. You watch an animal doing something and you recognise the behaviour immediately. Then you look at a person doing something and realise we’re not always as far removed from it as we’d like to think. And I think there is something else in that which interests me. Animals don’t generally have the luxury of pretending to be something else. A moray eel isn’t sitting in its cave thinking about its management style or whether it ought to be a better eel. It waits. Something comes along. It strikes. It feeds. It goes back into the cave. That’s what it does. Humans are obviously much more complicated than that, but sometimes I think we spend so much time trying to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing that we lose sight of the simple behaviour underneath it.

Obviously using the human and the dialogue is a better fit sometimes, and is necessary to get over a different kind of image or impact. But sometimes going through all that human shit to get there can be a long, drawn-out process, whereas using the animal can arrive you there just like that. So I think that’s why I use them. Sometimes the animal gives you the image. Sometimes it gives you the behaviour. And sometimes it gives you the whole character, the complete situation you’re trying to get out. Depends on what you’re writing about at the time, I think. How you want to play your hand this time?

Final Extract From “The Poetics of Precarious Work in the Poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes by Peter Raynard” by permission of the author

(This article was originally published in the OUP academic journal English: Volume 73, Issue 282, Autumn 2024)

Here is a link to the whole article:

Voss and Hayes Article by Peter Raynard

Festschrift Interview

Q:14. What inspired you to write the Chinese Worker poems?

I first came across Chinese Worker poetry when I encountered the poem Obituary for a Peanut by Xu Lizhi. In the poem he uses the label on the back of a jar of peanut butter; the product specification, ingredients, manufacturer’s address and contact details, its origin, how long it can be kept after opening, all of those ordinary bits of information, and it somehow reads like the history of a human life. And I thought it was so simple and authentic. There was no grand statement in it, no telling you what you were supposed to think. It just took this completely ordinary thing and somehow made it carry the weight of a person’s life. So I looked a bit deeper into Xu Lizhi and found out that he had been a factory worker at Foxconn, making products for some of the biggest technology companies in the world, mainly Apple, and that he had committed suicide at the age of 24 jumping from the roof of the dormitory building where he lived at the Foxconn complex. That obviously gave the poem another weight, but what really interested me was that the poem itself didn’t need to tell me any of that. The ordinary details were enough to make you start thinking about the person behind them.

Then while looking into him I came across Iron Moon, the anthology of Chinese migrant worker poetry. There were writers in the collection who had come from very different places and circumstances, but many of them had left rural villages and gone into the cities looking for work, more money, a different life, or simply some kind of future for themselves. And then they found themselves inside these factories, workshops, construction sites and industrial zones, living in dormitories, working long hours, separated from their families and trying to make a life inside this enormous machine of Chinese industrialisation. And what blew me away was how little some of them seemed to need to tell you in order to make you feel all of that. The writing was so plain and simple. Almost pared back to nothing. A machine, a screw, a finger, a dormitory, a train, a bowl, a pair of hands, a fluorescent light, somebody going home for the full moon, somebody not going home. These almost inconsequential details kept accumulating until suddenly you were looking at a whole life.

Zheng Xiaoqiong was another writer who really stayed with me. Her poems in Iron Moon, things like Iron, Industrial Zone, Assembly Line and Moonlight: Married Workers Living Apart, have this incredible physical quality to them. She had worked in factories and there are these descriptions in the poems of metal, dust, machinery, tired bodies, women working, people separated from the people they love. She didn’t need to stand outside it all and tell you that industrialisation is bad or that migrant workers are suffering. She put you inside the place and let you feel what it is like.

There are other writers in the anthology who do something similar in completely different ways. Ji Zhishui writes about bleeding fingers, deaf workers, dinners and trials. Cheng Peng about abandoned villages, homesickness and construction workers. There are miners and factory workers and people working in rubber factories, print shops and watch factories. And you begin to realise as you go through it that this isn't one story about one factory or one worker, it is thousands of individual lives being pulled from the countryside into these huge industrial cities and then trying to survive there. That’s what’s so powerful about the writing. They weren't writing about workers as an idea. They were writing about people who happened to be workers. That distinction was important. Because I had already been writing, amongst other things, about people in the courier industry, I knew what it was like to spend time inside a control room where people are being measured, watched, categorised and pushed around by systems that are much bigger than they are. So when I came across these Chinese Worker poets, I recognised something in them. Obviously the circumstances were very different, and I would never pretend otherwise, but there was something familiar in the way they looked at the small details of working life and allowed those details to tell the bigger story. That was probably the biggest influence on me. Not so much the subject of Chinese factories itself, but the way they wrote about them. I saw in them what I’d always felt and tried to do, that you didn't have to shout. You didn't have to put the politics at the front of the poem. You could put a man beside a machine. You could put a woman under a fluorescent light. You could put a screw falling onto the floor. You could put a peanut butter label in front of somebody. And if you looked closely enough at that one small thing, the whole fucking world could start appearing around it. That really connected with me.

So when I started writing about Chinese migrant workers, I wasn't trying to imitate the Chinese Worker poets, and certainly wasn't trying to pretend I knew what their lives were like. I was trying to use that same thing they were using - that ability to look closely at the person and the small event. There are poems I’ve written that came directly out of that interest, including Flesh Accessories, which we published a couple of days ago which is dedicated to Xu Lizhi. That poem came from the idea of workers becoming almost indistinguishable from the machines they operate, becoming part of the manufacturing process itself. I wanted it very stripped back because, you know, sometimes the more you put into a poem, the less it can actually say. So I wanted the language to be almost brutally simple and let the final idea do the work.

There are also the poems about migrant workers and strangers in the city, where the Chinese Worker poetry is there more underneath the surface. I'm interested in what happens when somebody leaves the place they come from and enters somewhere where everything is unfamiliar - the language, or the accents, the streets, the work, the people, the rules - and they have to try and make some kind of life out of it. I suppose that's what I think Iron Moon gives more than anything else. It makes you look again at the worker as a person rather than the worker as a subject. And I think that's why I liked those poems so much. They suffered enormously, many of them, but the poems aren't simply poems about suffering. There is homesickness in them, humour, love, sex, loneliness, anger, boredom, exhaustion, memory, family and all the other ordinary things that make up a life. The factory is there, but the person is still there inside it. And that was something I always found interesting when I was writing. So a kind of recognition came from reading them. Something I could identify with. Because ultimately that's what I'm interested in. Not the factory. Not the corporation. Not even the politics. The person standing inside it all. That's what these writers, in their simple, pared down way, excel at, I think. So that’s why I got hooked on them and have found them so influential.

From “Underneath”

From “Unpublished”

Steven Bruce On Martin Hayes

Festschrift Interview

Extract From "The Poetics of Precarious Work in the Poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes by Peter Raynard” by permission of the author

From “Machine Poems”

From “Unpublished“

From “The Poetics of Precarious Work in the Poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes by Peter Raynard” by permission of the author

Festschrift Interview

From “Machine Poems”

From “Underneath”

From “Unpublished”

From “The Poetics of Precarious Work in the Poetry of Fred Voss and Martin Hayes by Peter Raynard” with the author’s permission

From “Unpublished”

Festschrift Interview

Q:13. What role do contemporary events, those just this moment happening outside of your work, play in your writing?

You can’t switch off to events going on in the world. You can’t numb yourself to them. There’s too much suffering, too much abandonment, too much cruelty meted out by corporations, governments, and other particularly nasty individuals. It all gets proper full on at times. But as I say, you can’t just turn away and numb yourself to it all. You have to stay involved, aware, vocal, otherwise what do you become?

So, yes, contemporary events are forever present in the thinking and the living, continue to shape and inform you, but in the writing, I’ve always stayed away from the politics. Any overt political statement. I’ve always thought it best to let the politics bleed through the story, or situation, you’re getting across. Let the people and the situations they find themselves in reveal the politics behind it, rather than using the politics to make the people, or use the people, to get your statement across. Because once you start doing that, once the poem starts telling the reader what it thinks, rather than showing them something and letting them work it out, I think you’re in danger of losing something. The people become examples of an argument rather than people. And I’m much more interested in the person than the argument. The argument comes from writing the people.

The things that have always pissed me off are bullies, injustice and victimisation. So you don’t have to be an Einstein to work out why I was drawn to writing about work and other associated social issues like housing, the price of heat, food, homelessness, mental health, debt. Those three things, the bullies, injustice and victimisation, are there every day in those worlds. So, you know, it’s something you get to know about. I’ve been there. I’ve watched people being treated badly, watched people being pushed around, watched people trying to get through the day, try to keep hold of something they need and love, while something much bigger than them is making decisions about their lives. And that, I think, is where contemporary events come into the writing for me. You might read about a government making a decision, a company closing something down, a war starting somewhere, people being displaced, some new bit of legislation being announced, the cost of heat and food going up and up and never coming down again. All of that is the big picture. But what interests me is what happens to the person living underneath all that. What does it mean to the man who has to get up at five in the morning to go to work? What does it mean to the woman waiting for a bus? What does it mean to somebody sitting in a room somewhere trying to work out how they’re going to pay the rent? What does it do to somebody who has to tell somebody else that they’re being made redundant because of cutbacks? Those are the bits I’m interested in. The little things where all the grand stuff eventually ends up.

I value a lot in people’s writing, poems and all types of art, their authenticity. You can tell it a mile off. Whether it is real or just being produced to make a grand statement. And I think that’s probably why I’m suspicious of, or are turned off by, anything that feels like it has arrived already knowing what it wants to tell me. I’d rather somebody show something small and real and let me discover what is behind it. If there is anything to discover behind it that is.

So you know, politics and contemporary events are not altogether missing in the writing, they are there but more in the miniature rather than in the grand. They are there in the little events and hopefully the reader will pick up on that. See through the story being told to join up the dots. Because sometimes a worker getting shouted at by their manager, or somebody being refused a place to sleep, or somebody sitting alone in a room in their 90’s waiting for a phone call, can tell you more about the world we’re living in than a poem that stands up and tells you what the world is like. You just have to look closely enough, into the miniature, and all the big things are there.

Review of Ox by Stella Blackhouse, HCE Magazine

https://hcemagazine.com/review-martin-hayes-ox/

Review of Ox by Steve Spence, Litter magazine

https://www.littermagazine.org/2021/05/review-ox-by-martin-hayes.html

Festschrift Interview

Q:12. How important do you think memory is to your writing?

Well, when it works it is a very helpful tool. HA! It depends on what you’re writing about, I guess. Memory is always involved because you’re nearly always writing about what’s happened in the past tense. Whether it’s something that’s happened at work that day, that week, the week before, so you’re always using it of course. But then sometimes you’re writing about something, a particular scenario, and you dig a bit deeper into it, use it to add another layer into a poem, and another layer. Use it to recall something from the past that is relevant to the thing you’re writing now. So memory can help then to build what you’re writing and add more depth, or more historical examples to the current one, which then gives the poem a more charged, a more kind of deeper significance.

Other times, something from the past comes back and starts nagging at you, so you might choose to contemplate that for a bit and use that to start writing something that works from the past towards the now, rather than the other way around.

What I think is most frightening about memory though is when it doesn’t work. When you can’t recall something. It’s there on the tip of your tongue, or on the tip of a brain twig, but there isn’t quite the synaptic flash to recall it. So you’ve got this thing that you know you know, have lived or read about before, but it isn’t quite making that leap from the subconscious, or wherever else it is those memories are stored, into the conscious. And if that starts happening more and more, then that’s when you start to worry a bit that you might be getting a bit old and the electrical currents that were once strong and firm enough to build those bridges that anything from the past could travel back into the light on, might be getting a bit too weak to carry all of their freight.

But you just have to find ways around that. Try to find a workaround. Not let anything get in the way of the writing. That way, if you don’t give up, keep on with it, you never know what might come out. And often it is surprising what you end up with, can sometimes even be better than what you were planning on in the first place. So memory yes, it is a very useful tool when it works, a very useful servant, but I don’t think it is the boss, more powerful than the mental impulse, the need to want to, or have to, write, get it out of you. That is the Boss.