The Isis Poetry Competition HT21 Winner
1 On a summer evening, I stood outside on the pavement lifting my arms & pouring my own-most entire being out downwards, watching it flow in a slow, steady stream & become a shapeless little pool on the pavement — translucent, tacky, awkward, glittering; catching & holding the du
Bedtime Stories
“Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person,” a girl murmurs to an ex-boyfriend. She is digitised and sports beautiful bangs, a puzzle of pixels dancing across the nation’s laptop screens three weeks into lockdown. But the tragedy of it rings true: falling in love with
The Isis Podcasts: Visual Art
The Isis Magazine discusses visual art with Jenny Lewis, editorial photographer whose work centers on her experience of living and working in East London, and Jiab Prachakul, a self-taught contemporary figurative artist whose work is concerned with identity. Here is the link to the podcast: https://
Verse ex Machina
Our human souls have been allowed to stand alone, Your love with spirit confirms the sunk brow of God The lines materialise on the screen. They are, admittedly, recognisable as poetic. Then you examine them for a little longer.
Revenge of the Muse
Near the end of the Tate Modern’s Dora Maar retrospective, the largest so far in the UK, there is a recording of a conversation between the eighty-seven-year-old Dora Maar and Francis Morris, now head of the Tate Modern. In the conversation, originally recorded for the Tate’s 1995 Picasso retros
Manchester, the Met, and #MeToo
Just as #MeToo was gaining mainstream attention in late 2017, a petition was launched to remove one of Balthus’ most iconic portraits. The painting, Thérèse Dreaming (1938), depicts a young girl sitting with her underwear and groin area deliberately exposed. Her white underwear contrasts with th
Reconciling URL and IRL Feminism
I first became acquainted with Miranda July through her fiction. My friend, Scarlet, recommended her critically acclaimed novel, The First Bad Man, which I have since lent to my mother, boyfriend, and best friend. July’s novel is a story of humorous eroticism, habitual patterns, and the search for
Remembering the Emo Music of the Midwest
704 West High Street in the college town of Urbana, Illinois is no ordinary house. Lying in a leafy midwestern suburb, with weeds pushing through the sidewalk cracks and an overgrown front yard, a passerby could be forgiven for not looking twice at its bleached horizontal planks and single window. J
Problematizing “Frida-Mania”
2am, 3am, 4am. Every single time slot was booked when the V&A opened its doors for a full 48-hour period during the last few days of the “Making Her Self Up” exhibition. Preceded by the 2017 Frida Kahlo show at The Dalí Museum, and followed by the largest ever retrospective of the artist’