Mischief Of One Kind And Another
Mischief Of One Kind And Another
'Mischief Of One Kind and Another' is the ninth Nine Series Anthology and brings together the work of Jennie E. Owen, Jen Feroze and Ben Tufnell. It is an anthology that explores the inter-relationships of different genres of art and their translation into poetry, whether through the use of ekphrasis, intertextuality or the creation of worlds.
Jennie E. Owen's uses paintings and places as jump off points for entry into her dark, immersive poems, giving voices to characters such as in 'Dead Mother and Child'
I know that I am a painting, that much I understand.
I'm rendered in flat blocks of red and orange
Jen Feroze responds to literary classics within her poems, using the work of writers and poets such as Edward Lear, the Brothers Grimm and Frances Hodgson Burnett to give new life and identities to characters we thought we knew so well, such as in 'Catching a Tiger' which draws off Judith Kerr's famous children's book for inspiration
Sophie's mummy was different afterwards;
her gaze flicking towards the door.
In Ben Tufnell's poems we enter into a haunted, eroding landscape that is inhabited by creatures and spectres that create a sense of gothic foreboding and subtle horror, almost like a personal fairy tale world inhabited by 'Owls' and 'Ghosts' or as in the 'Crocodile' of
The childhood dream
of the gnarled beast beneath
the bed. Long rotting grin
slowly opening and closing
with a castanet click
in thick darkness.
'One Kind of Mischief and Another' is an unsettling adventure into the dark corners where strange things lurk and may, if you're not on your guard, drag you in.
Praise for 'Mischief Of One Kind And Another'
“Mischief Of One Kind And Another" is a gingerbread house of a book, beguiling the reader with an intoxicating mix of childhood memory and menace. Jennie E. Owen’s compelling ekphrastic poems dance intricately with notorious artworks (and the legends surrounding them) in unexpected and haunting ways. Jen Feroze interrogates everyday darkness through the lens of children’s literature, in a set of ‘after’ poems as powerfully imagistic and playfully unsettling as anything she has published to date. Ben Tufnell’s poems are spare, vivid, clever, and arresting, replete with phrases that reverberate long after reading. The result is an anthology that intrigues and bewitches in ways the reader will not be able to resist, and will thoroughly enjoy.
- Mary Ford Neal
- Poet Dawning (Indigo Dreams), Relativism (Taproot)
Jen Feroze
Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two young children. A former Foyle Young Poet, her work has appeared in publications including Under the Radar, Butcher's Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, Spelt, One Hand Clapping and The Alchemy Spoon. She has guest edited anthologies for Black Bough Poetry and The Mum Poem Press, and she placed second in the 2022/2023 Magma Editors' Prize. Her debut pamphlet 'Tiny Bright Thorns' is publishing in 2024 with Nine Pens. Jen loves cold water swimming, chunky knitwear, amaretto sours and cheese you can eat with a spoon. Find her on the artist formerly known as Twitter @jenlareine and on Instagram @the_colourofhope.
Mischief of One Kind and Another
After Maurice Sendak
The trees were first to spot him. Gossipy. They said ‘wild’.
We didn’t pay them much mind, after all, we were bred wild.
He was wolf pelted, baby faced, a paper-crowned captain
smelling of soap, love - a warm gingerbread wild.
We were old, tired, claws sheathed, sleep ready. Strange
that this slender child made us rumpus instead, wild!
He danced us hypnotic, led us jungle deep, moon drunk;
hooting and laughing, turned our calls and our tread wild.
We’d forgotten this freedom, the flow of night in our blood.
He awoke something in us we’d kept long unfed. Wild
and thrumming, we loved him. We lifted him high
‘til he turned on his wolf’s heels and suddenly fled wild
we chased him offshore, talons raking sea foam
still he sailed off and left us there, back to his bedwild.
Some of us stand, howling ‘Max’ to the dark sea,
in and out of weeks, our throats keening red, wild.
Jennie E. Owen
Jennie E. Owen has been published in a large range of journals and anthologies including the Rialto, Wasafiri, Agenda Poetry, Acumen, Neon, Envoi, Tears in the Fence, Iota, and Magma Poetry. She is Best of the Net, Pushcart and Forward Prize nominated. Jennie's pamphlet The Horses Still Run, will be published by The Flight of the Dragonfly Press later in 2024. Jennie teaches Creative Writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire, UK with her husband and three children. She is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, focusing on poetry and place.
The Crying Boy
Giovanni Bragolin (1911-1981)
He doesn’t look the sort to start a fire
to scorch your house, too young, too weary
to play with matches; all the heat
sits in his fevered cheek. So remember,
you were the ones that called for the burning:
piling child, frame and drift wood. You
should have known that such distress is not
displayed in a front room, like an antique trinket
porcelain dog or silver backed heirloom. He does not belong
in the hall way, or kitchenette. This lost shadow
before shadow, wet and dark-eyed, the hint
of a trembling lip.
Sooty toddler, he could be yours,
this sticky fingered infant of war.
Yet you all
proclaimed him the monster, built the bonfire.
So only now he creeps
the edge
like a flame,
(like a threat)
Ben Tufnell
Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. His poems have been published by Anthropocene, Entropy, Pangyrus, The Rialto, Shearsman and Smartish Pace, amongst others, and his stories have been published by Conjunctions, Litro, Nightjar Press, Storgy and Structo. He has been longlisted for the BBC Short Story Award and shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award. His debut novel, THE NORTH SHORE, is published by Fleet (Little, Brown).
Ghosts
Something becomes visible
against the windows of the house
like condensation or the delicate web
of cold on winter mornings,
the frosting of breath - of words
arriving, thoughts becoming,
the tiny crystals of reason
knitted surely into a fine veil -
and the garden, and everything,
slips behind this fragile film
of mist, transcendent,
as darkness gains in weight
and at such moments
we are frail, impermanent.
