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morphrog 32 goes live

morphrog’s 32nd edition is now live at www.morphrog.com It includes photography by Martin Kay, Bruach Kandinsky-Mhor and Peter Stewart, prose by Phil Powrie and poems from around the world by Craig Constantine, Neil Elder, Emily Hay, Jenny Hockey, Michael Igoe, Antony Johae, Anna Lewis, Joseph Long, Stephanie Ross, Gordon Scapens, Sanjeev Sethi and Ian C Smith.

morphrog 33 will be published in July and submissions of poetry, prose and photography are now invited for the summer edition. Please send work for consideration in a single document (Word if poetry or prose) to morphrog@gmail.com

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Announcing morphrog 31

morphrog 31, with poetry and prose by twenty new and established writers and photographs by Peter Stewart, is now live at www.morphrog.com

morphrog, now in its 16th year, originally focussed on ‘poetry in the extreme’ but has recently expanded its field of interest to include translations, short prose fiction, photographs and other visual images, narratives of reminiscence, dream and memory, and other creative media. morphrog is a bi-annual publication, appearing in July and January.

Here is a taste of the latest edition:

James Piatt

All The Lonely People

Harvard University researchers…
discovered that loneliness is as
deadly as smoking. (8/24/2016)
And 51% of adults worldwide feel lonely
Meta-Gallup Survey (10/24/2023)

All the lonely people, with
forlorn memories screaming
inside their minds filled with
an unquenchable sadness,
stagger against the
turbulent winds that blow
the bitterness of today’s
images of misery into their
lives.

Dark images awakened by
voices of shadow people,
cause their torn emotions of
despair to fall into the
turbulence of a melancholy
absurdity.

As hopelessness soars in the
sky’s vastness, all the lonely
people try to stifle the
darkness of the smoldering
shadows laced with cold
contradictions. Their gloom
filled minds resist the
soothing symphony of
fiddling crickets playing in
the ebony hours of the
night.

An old man senses pulses of
darkness trapped inside
dust and old memories,
soaring in the coarseness of
merciless time.
He wanders aimlessly during
the empty hours of the
night’s savage time, trying
to escape the metallic air
embedded with invisible nails
being hammered into his
rusted memories. Like all
the other lonely
people, he senses, his
memories are knifing their
way into anguish.

His happy times are
unraveling threads of
reality, and he finds his
sliver of memories, like
shreds of bleached bones,
are staggering over illusions
veiled in a painful and
dismal unreality.

Like all the lonely people,
his memories are emerging
with the sharp bitterness of
lingering tears, and his
mind, like theirs, is walking
through whispers of fear
puncturing his sad thoughts
with world sorrows.

James Piatt is a nonagenarian poet and novelist. He lives in California in a replica 1900s eastern farmhouse with his wife Sandy, and dog Scout. 

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morphrog hits 30!

morphrog’s 30th edition is now live at www.morphrog.com

This is another truly international edition, with poems and prose from nineteen writers based in or hailing from places as diverse as Canada, Germany, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, the UK and the USA, together with photographs by co-editor Peter Stewart. Submissions for morphrog 31 (July 2025) – poetry, prose, photographs, audio, whatever! – are invited at morphrog@gmail.com See the masthead of the current edition for submission guidelines.

From morphrog 30:

St Malo

Then I sailed to a tight-bunched town
pushing its fist out to sea, ramparts
razed by Allies’ planes, to a hotel
compressed like a book on a shelf —

tramped up shallow spiral stairs,
a drooping key in the lock of my door —
I walked in my sleep that night, a landing
cramped as a handkerchief, acid alive

in my guts. I swear I risked the well
of the stairs, stole into alleys
where light was scant, into a vestige
of war. Rationed vittles occupied

stalls, respectable women sent
road signs askew, inked bank notes
with Free France Now. Misdirected mail.
On a brothel doorstep, a newlaid turd.

I know I risked the stairwell —
I needed the soothe of waves,
lost myself down cobbled ravines,
aching for the sea.

© Jenny Hockey

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morphrog 29 lands

The 29th edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com. Contributors are:

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, retired mathematician and current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip. His latest collection is Identified Flying Objects (Shoestring, 2024).

Tom Barwell Poet, psychotherapist and coach Tom Barwell. Recently published in Does It Have Pockets and Poetica Review.

James Owens whose poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Channel, Arc, Dalhousie Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and Atlanta Review. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in Ontario, Canada. His latest publication is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020).

Gordon Scapens, widely published over many years in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and competitions, most recently winning the Brian Nesbit Poetry Award.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He edited Dreich Planet #1, an anthology for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. He lives in Mumbai, India.

John Short lives near Liverpool again after a previous life in southern Europe. He reads at venues in Liverpool, Chester and beyond. His work has appeared in over 80 magazines and anthologies, and he was a Pushcart nominee in 2018. His latest poetry collection is In Search of a Subject (Cerasus, 2023).

J.S. Watts is a British poet and novelist who weaves the fantastical and the literary with other vibrant strands to create glowing, multi-faceted writing. Originally from London, she now lives in Cambridgeshire. Her three poetry collections, Cats and Other Myths, Years Ago You Coloured Me and Underword, are published by Lapwing Publications, as is her multi-award nominated SF poetry pamphlet, Songs of Steelyard Sue. Her novels are published in the US and UK by Vagabondage Press.

Submissions are invited for morphrog 30, which will be published in January.

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Kokopelli looms large in morphrog’s 28th number 

The 28th edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com  In addition to new work by Yorkshire poets Jenny Hockey and A D W Kerr, California-based James Piatt and Geoffrey Winch, awarded the accolade of the UK’s best Small Press Poet by Purple Patch magazine in 2011, morphrog 28 features an extended sequence of poems about Kokopelli, the joker god of the Native American pantheon in the South-Western United States, by renowned poet, translator and grammarian Michael Swan, a former winner of the Times’ Stephen Spender Prize.  

Submissions are invited for morphrog 29, which will go live in July.  

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morphrog 27 goes live

The latest edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com, featuring poetry and prose by a roster of contributors from around the world. Work by familiar names – Angela Arnold, Ian Heffernan, Gordon Scapens, Gerald Seniuk, Ian C Smith, Rodney Wood – is complemented by contributions from newcomers Ben Banyard, Salvatore Difalco, Vyarka Kozareva, Massimiliano Nastri, James Owens, the pseudonymous sds and John White, whose poem ‘Picnic at St Catherine’s Guidlford’ is accompanied by a photograph of the event itself by Fred Pipes.

Number 27 is an especially varied edition, including as it does a  long poem about the story of Ukraine by Canadian poet Gerald Seniuk, himself of Ukrainian heritage, Ian Heffernan’s poems inspired by the work of Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai and republication of Luigi Coppola’s poem ‘Poetry Set to Music’, now set to music! Submissions for morphrog 28 (January 2024) are now open. Send no more than six poems, accompanied by a bio note and headshot, to morphrog@gmail.com

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morphrog26 lands

The 26th edition of morphrog is now live at www.morphrog.com.

This is another truly international edition, featuring poetry from Canada (Gerald Seniuk), Germany (Aprilia Zank), Ireland (Edward Lee), Italy (Alex Josephy and Davide Trame) and the USA (James G Piatt and Nolo Segundo) alongside work by UK poets Liz Adams, Jenny Hockey, Angela Kirby, Gordon Scapens and J S Watts.

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morphrog’s 25th number lands

morphrog 25, celebrating, as ever, ‘poetry in the extreme’, is now live at http://www.morphrog.com. This latest edition of Frogmore’s online journal includes work from Ella Walsworth-Bell, Ian Heffernan, Mark McDonnell, Heather Sager, Gordon Scapens, Ian C Smith and Rodney Wood and also features a gallery of photographs by the late Martin Kay, whose work has graced many previous editions.

morphrog now welcomes submissions of translations, short prose/flash fiction, photographs and other visual images and audio content, as well as poetry ‘in the extreme’ or otherwise. Visit www.morphrog.com for submission guidelines.

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morphrog 24 – Frogmore’s online journal of poetry and more – now live

morphrog 24 is now live at http://www.morphrog.com

This 24th edition includes work from the usual eclectic mix of writers: Joe Balaz, who writes in Hawaiian Island Pidgin and American English; Ian Corcos and Mark Czanik, both currently in transit and on their way somewhere; Chinese mystic, poet and philosopher Yuan Hongri, translated by Yuanbing Zhang, resident of Shandong Province, China; Oversteps authors Jenny Hockey (Going to Bed with the Moon) and David Olsen (After Hopper and Lange); Calvin Liu, ethnic Chinese academic, resident in London; Pauline Rowe, winner of the 2021 Saboteur Award for best poetry pamphlet with The Weight of Snow (Maytree Press); and Ian C Smith, who writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia, and Flinders Island, Tasmania.

Morphrog 24 is dedicated to Martin Kay, who died suddenly and tragically in November and whose name will be familiar to readers of morphrog from the many striking photographs he contributed to previous editions.

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morphrog morphs again

morphrog has always been ‘the frog that morphed’. We have tried to keep each issue fresh by keeping things in a state of flux, changing the format regularly, mixing images and poetry, creating synaesthetic content that breaks down formal barriers. Now we are morphing again. Our focus is still on the poetry, but we also welcome short stories, prose poems, audio-visual content, images and anything in between.

As morphrog 22 went to press, the UK announced a third period of ‘lockdown’ in the face of a new variant of the Covid-19 virus. Not a great start to 2021, but a timely reminder that change is a law of nature! Everything — to paraphrase Heraclitus — is in a state of flow. Let’s hope things change for the better as 2021 unfolds.

morphrog 23 includes contributions from Jane Angué, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, Daniel Bennett, Joseph Eastell, Alexandra Fössinger, Ian Heffernan, Jenny Hockey, Yuan Hongri, Martin Kay, Marian Kilcoyne, Angela Kirby, Manu Mangattu, Guy Martin, Anne-Marie O’Brien, Aaron Rice, Ian C Smith, D J Tyrer and J S Watts, and is live at: http://www.morphrog.com

morphrog is an online journal edited by Jeremy Page and Peter Stewart publishing ‘poetry – and now also prose – in the extreme’. It appears twice a year, in January and July.