The87press welcomes you to The Hythe Review which was launched as part of our commitment to widening critical conversations in literature, and poetry more specifically. We are deeply concerned by and mindful of the decline of literary studies in the Global North and the increasing insularity of English Literature as a critical discipline and practice. Creative Writing as a practice, particularly in the UK, relies on custom and culture as much as formal pedagogical contact. As adherents of cross-culturality we recognise that study takes place in a variety of settings and forms, both formal and informal sites.
The Hythe Review will be produced in partnership with the Open Library of the Humanities and other funding bodies such as Arts Council England. It will provide a fee of £100 per commissioned/accepted piece of criticism or poetry (with the view to expand the remit to incorporate short fiction in the future). It will also benefit from the formation of a new group of associate editors (Alycia Pirmohamed, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, and Abeera Khan) who will work closely with co-founders of the87press Azad Ashim Sharma and Kashif Sharma-Patel who take up roles of commissioning and managing editors respectively for this new publication.
We envision The Hythe Review to provide a space for literary conversations to take shape, coalescing around our shared inheritance of modernism, marxism(s), anti-colonialism, anti-racism, environmentalism, and a commitment to building literary political community around publications as has always been the case with the work of the87press. We will print interviews between critics, editors, and authors/artists alongside essays and new works of poetry, working through commissioned work and, from our second issue onwards, open submissions extended warmly to racialised/global majority authors and authors who are neurodiverse, LGBTQ+, and/or working-class.
We prioritise experimental poetry and poetics that engage language and cultural identity, the transgression of colonial bordering, the role of aesthetic education in fostering cosmopolitanism-from-below and the possibilities of poetic form. We also give space to interesting and well-styled cultural essays that explore contemporary works of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry released by independent publishers only.
A working definition of an independent publisher is: not the Big 5 corporate publishing houses. We are interested in work conventionally conceived of as on the periphery or margin and yet prove, through their existence, readership, and prescience, to destabilise the arbitrariness of those categories.
The Hythe Review, as an outgrowth of the87press, will participate in PACBI and maintain a commitment to Palestinian Liberation. Part of our solidarity work will seek to publish new writing from Palestinian writers and reviews of existing collections of poetry or works of fiction which redress the gaps in current critical discourse when it comes to Palestinian literature produced in Historic Palestine or in Diaspora.
Additionally, The Hythe Review will serve as a centre of literary criticism, poetry and poetics, that is rooted in Black thought, and prioritises cross-cultural dialogue as has been historically pioneered by Black, Asian, and other racialised communities in the UK. Here we seek to encourage a new generation of racialised poets who have often been pigeonholed through diversity initiatives and/or excluded from more conventional locations of cultural discourse to actively contribute to the production of knowledge and representation of our own literature with all the complexity these works make manifest. As such, The Hythe Review serves as one location amongst many where the spatial concept ‘diaspora’ is being rethought, redefined, re-energised, in this case, as a space for literary politics to emerge and as a place for literary culture to make home anew.
Much of the work published by the Hythe over the past five years has sought to redress imbalances within poetry publishing, providing an open-access digital platform for grassroots global majority writers, queer writers and neurodivergent writers, both in creative and critical formats. The Hythe Review, to be released biannually, streamlines our digital platform and builds upon previous achievements. The Hythe and The Hythe+ will be combined into The Hythe Archive and housed on the87press website. The Hythe Review will be available for free online through the OLH server.
Our first issue includes a wide array of work. Haider Al-Ghazali’s Obituary Poem for Fatima Hassouna follows in a Palestinian tradition that often uses poetic verse in a funerary context. We include poems by Nasser Rabah, one of the great poets still living in Gaza. Sumia Juxun writes in response to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, while Shripad Sinnakaar speaks of caste, crows, and dark-blueish kohl. Anthony Vahni Capildeo presents four sharp new poems, while Jay Gao extracts for us several pages from his Bark, Archive, Splinter sequence, and Canisia Lubrin’s Bright Machine is also excerpted. New work can also be found from Sarah Lasoye, Tarik Dobbs, Iman Mersal, and Keston Sutherland. Sanna Wani and Manahil Bandukwala’s epistolary prose poem reflects on craft and migration beautifully, while the latest installment of Nathaniel Mackey’s ever-mesmerising Song of the Andoumboulou (325) will meet you too. Additionally, we are very pleased to republish three recent poems from Face Press by the great late modernist J. H. Prynne in honour of his passing.
Review essays include David Grundy on Harmony Holiday’s MAAFA, situating it in the radical tradition of Black poetics; Hina Baloch on Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s Trans Femme Futures; and Jumanah Younis on Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces. Kashif Sharma-Patel interviews Ammiel Alcalay reflecting on translation, modernism, and the ‘imperial abhorrences’ at work in West Asia and beyond.
Competing Interests
The authors of this statement are the editors of the journal.