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Jonathan Gibbs

Jonathan Gibbs was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize 2013. He has since published a novel, Randall or the Painted Grape (Galley Beggar Press).



Articles Available Online


Jessie Greengrass’s ‘Sight’

Book Review

February 2018

Jonathan Gibbs

Book Review

February 2018

Jessie Greengrass’s debut story collection caught my eye with its delightfully extravagant title, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to...

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May 2016

Cinema on the Page

Jonathan Gibbs

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May 2016

Film is a bully. It wants to make its viewers feel, and it has the tools to do so....

  MODES OF BEING   A new hobby of mine is repeating a word until it strays from its centre of meaning, so risibly            alive (an egg tumbling through grass) unburdened of itself, beyond thinking I lead a rich and duplicitous life on the ward I’m fed well All the residents know me, their cherubic faces assuaging my fears in the midst of some sinister music   I’m happy enough letting the television play, allowing sunlight its languorous dominion   In the cool phosphorescence of these bus stop days (my dust rising and returning) comes feeling       CRYPSIS   Stop the gunboats! Lately I’m relishing being a strange fungus in the meaning of the hall unmolested, my brain a razed monastery of thoughts a prized gourd at the funeral of verbs   I’ve only growth as a means of mobility Here beneath the smashed, chaotic flagstones a specious beach   bestrewn with slogans, garbled soundbites cracked versions of ourselves exhumed in sunlight in a tableau of what’s real   What to tell you? That it’s enough to make beautiful things to love redly despite the expiry date of dogs   That the mind blooms serenely, in virtue of itself: a feted puffball   of which these poems are the spores       THREE OR FOUR HILLS AND A CLOUD   Morning Time to crank up the machine without which this wouldn’t be possible   (You gesture towards some tangerines, a laptop, a fresh pot of coffee)   This still life cannot excite me today, will not sate nor diminish this longing to escape this life for jungle scenes to play swingball with vigour, meet monkeys   Bad example, but you know what I mean about torpor, the bureaucrat’s burden, so often fishing in stagnant pools when each door opens onto salvation   In the next life (whoever you are) I’ll be good, like the spring, if not better I’ll wade out into flowerful fields and disappear I’ll see you tomorrow  

Contributor

August 2014

Jonathan Gibbs

Contributor

August 2014

Jonathan Gibbs was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize 2013. He has since published a novel, Randall or...

The Story I'm Thinking Of

fiction

April 2013

Jonathan Gibbs

fiction

April 2013

There were seven of us sat around the table. Seven grown adults, sat around the table. It was late. We had eaten, and we had...

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Issue No. 7

Bracketing the World: Reading Poetry through Neuroscience

James Wilkes

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Issue No. 7

The anechoic chamber at University College London has the clutter of a space shared by many people: styrofoam cups,...

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December 2012

Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim

Dylan Trigg

feature

December 2012

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919.[1] In this older work, the...

poetry

May 2014

Two Poems from Grun-tu-molani

Vidyan Ravinthiran

poetry

May 2014

The Sky there was a uniform inactive grey, except when stared at through a chainlink fence; those who could...

 

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