Sometimes a poetry journal comes along and it blows you away. Mantissa Poetry Review is one such journal. I fell completely in love with Issue One. The gorgeous cover and its design. The typography and coloured endpapers. 

I love everything about it from the lush feel of the velvety matt cover under my fingertips to the gorgeous matching endpapers. The layout, design and typography are stunning. And it incorporates verse, text, colour and illustrations to make a visual feast. If all that isn't enough to convince you to go out and buy a copy now, it's printed in Australia on recycled paper.

And the poems. Oh my. The poems. These are poems that take what you think a poem is and twist it, turn it on its head and turn you inside out. The poets play with white space and mess with your mind. There is colour and illustrations. And fabulous experiments. This is most definitely a journal to savour and one to own.

The poetry that Mantissa publishes is ‘other’. It is what floats behind and around the literature that aims to erupt. We hope this gives voice to, perhaps, ideas less spoken.

‘Mantissa’ by definition, is the fractional part of a floating point. It is the addition of comparatively small importance.

Imagine my joy when I found out that not one, but two of my poems (Attention: Ferntree Gully (December 2020) and Uncanny Valley) were going to appear in Issue Two of the Journal. I was over the moon! 

Not only that, the editor Erin Lyon, asked me to write a statement of poetics to be published in the journal along with my poems. You know me, I love thinking and writing about the creative process so to be asked to do exactly that and then have those words included in the journal was an honour.

Thank you Mantissa Poetry Review for publishing my poems and a statement about my creative process!