The Aftershock Review: Issue Three
The Aftershock Review
‘A JOLT TO THE MAINSTREAM’ — The Guardian
The Aftershock Review returns with a third wave.
Britain’s most talked-about poetry rupture.
Where Issue One named the damage, and Issue Two mapped the fragments that remain. Issue Three asks, more dangerously: What do we need but a bit of hope?
Across thirteen urgent sections, Issue Three moves through grief, witness, family, illness, childhood, desire, silence, place and rescue. In An Anthropology of Grief, the dead are not gone: they are carried in ashes, emails, post-mortem reports, river silt and the throat. In The Rear Bedroom, poetry becomes evidence, refusing to look away from war, atrocity and the room that remembers. In What Else Is a Body For?, the body is scanned, judged, medicated, exhausted, hungry and still tender. In Safety Checks, the language of protection turns cold in the mouth.
Elsewhere, childhood keeps crawling out. Desire becomes whale, knife, crown, cinema, shame. Language fractures across borders and inheritance. Ringroads, lakes, paintings, skulls, emojis and broken rooms gather pressure. And finally, in I’m Here, Love, the Cavalry Are on Their Way, the issue turns towards rescue, though never the simple kind.
The Aftershock Review is more than a magazine. It is a survivor-led poetry movement, made in the North West, built by community, and shaped by a queer, disabled and neurodivergent editor. It is where poetry refuses silence. Where aftermath becomes form. Where survival keeps speaking.
Made from bed.
Built by community.
Sustained by Arts Council England.
With gratitude to the T. S. Eliot Foundation.
The Aftershock Review is still beginning.
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