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If you've followed for @PoetryBrum & are wondering what
@PallinaPress is all about, it's the new small press
@SunaAfshan & I founded in Feb this year. We've published issue 3 & 4 of PBLJ through it and on Monday we are opening submissions for our first ever Pallina Pamphlets!
@PallinaPress is all about, it's the new small press
@SunaAfshan & I founded in Feb this year. We've published issue 3 & 4 of PBLJ through it and on Monday we are opening submissions for our first ever Pallina Pamphlets!
We spent ages thinking about the name, ethos & vision for the press (of course, all these things are related). Greek goddesses? No. Historical Brummie names? No. Place is important to us & so is mythology. One day, I started looking at the map, at the place where my forebears
originate from. I asked Suna about hers & found that too and there roughly halfway between the two is an unassuming village named Pallina. That's our mid-point; where we meet in the middle on the road to one another.
There's so much else we talked about. I love engaging with Greek mythology as much as the next poet but sometimes I just feel like fucking Odysseus, he's had enough remixes, and he's going to continue to as are all these characters. How many hundreds of recastings & retellings
will we read & keep producing about the same characters, places, stories. How many times will these names be written & read. I say this as I'm writing an Astynome/Cressida pamphlet 
But will I ever see Sparkbrook in literary poetry, Mirpur? I am putting my Daada Abu's name in
But will I ever see Sparkbrook in literary poetry, Mirpur? I am putting my Daada Abu's name in
my poems and my Nani's and I'll be damned if my shit about Sparkbrook ain't catalogued in the British Library. We are adding to this literary tradition & this culture & we're going to do it in our own image & make our own mythologies. We are naming things and defining them.
We don't see ourselves in it or in this space, so we are going to elbow our way into it all as much as we can manage to. We're curious about & interested in finding exciting new work from poets who feel that same sense of being marginal in this space for whatever reason.
So, pallina is a middle-ground, it's the place where two minds meet, it's our regionâthe Midlandsâand it's also a meeting point between two locations, okay? Who are you meeting when lockdown is over and where is your pallina?
