The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For April, we are delighted to publish two new works by P. C. Evans. The first of these, ‘Selection’, is published today with two more poems to follow at the weekend.
‘Take Away’ is about a Hannah, a fifteen-year-old struggling with ME in small town Sussex in 1990. It’s a personal story, as I was ill with ME in my mid-twenties during the same period. Hannah suffers disbelief and hostility about her illness, sometimes from classmates, but mostly from some care professionals, doctors and social workers.
Lucie McKnight Hardy (she/her) is the author of the novel Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) and a collection of short stories, Dead Relatives (2021), of which the Guardian said, ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’ Her stories have featured in various publications in addition to The Lonely Crowd, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press.
Her next novel, Night Babies, will be published by John Murray in Spring 2026.
Pauline Flynn reads her poem from Issue Fourteen. The Lonely Crowd · Mary of Egypt goes into the Desert to Repent her Lascivious Life Read how Pauline wrote ‘Mary of Egypt…’ here. Image by Pauline Flynn.
As a visual artist I am trained to see the detail in things. As a geometric abstract painter, I’m interested in paring back to shapes, pattern, colour and design in composition. When I began writing poetry, after I took a break from painting and did an MA in Creative Writing in Dublin, my tutor told me my poems were Imagist. I had read Haiku more than any other poetry form but when I took the poetry module and found I could author a poem, I was thrilled. Words have become a new medium that allows me to express myself more figuratively. The poems complement the paintings, and my life is now enriched by my engagement with both.
Matt Rader is the author of six collections of poems, most recently, Fine (Nightwood Editions 2024), as well as a collection of stories and a book of experimental nonfiction. His work has appeared in publications across North America, Australia, and Europe. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
Gavin Goodwin reads his short story, ‘The Fox’, accompanied by Nerys Clark on cello. The Lonely Crowd · ‘The Fox’ by Gavin Goodwin Gavin Goodwin lectures in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. His most recent publication is Creativity and Anxiety: Making, Meaning, Experience (Palgrave, 2023). ‘The Fox’ was written and performed by Gavin…
Matt Rader is the author of six collections of poems, most recently, Fine (Nightwood Editions 2024), as well as a collection of stories and a book of experimental nonfiction. His work has appeared in publications across North America, Australia, and Europe. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet every month throughout 2025. We are delighted to commence this series with two new poems by Eleanor Hooker. Winter Cradle And so you arrive, trudging through old snow to find me, cradling winter – dearest Grandpa, ghost enough to shadow this page.…
Nothing so white as the reindeer’s flank
on which the child has rested.
This is the real world, or is it?
Once, on Harlech Crescent, in the room,
in the bed where my great grandmother
had dwelt, I read the Snow Queen.
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of 2024. John Lavin The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) is surely an important book, giving the reader a more unfettered insight into the mind of the great poet than the equally essential Stepping Stones (Heaney’s autobiography-by-interview with Dennis O’Driscoll). Immediately the lapsed Heaney…
Karl Lorentz Ellerstraße 174 40227 Düsseldorf Annette Shröder Industriemuseum Cuxhavener Straße 9 40221 Düsseldorf Oberbilk, den 2. Oktober 1997 Dear Annette and the management team, I thought you would like to know that I have now come to terms with my unfair dismissal from the Industriemuseum. I’m no longer angry…
She remembered filing out of the workshop in a daze. Condemned by a jury of her peers. Jamie and Marcella asked her to come for a drink as if nothing had happened but she couldn’t face it. She felt as she had the first day. Innocent and enormously foolish. She didn’t belong here; she never had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t the brains; it was that her ambition wasn’t high-brow enough. Years of dulling necessary work had knocked that out of her. Life and single mothering and bad TV had thinned her emotions. The bad poetry of her youth at least had had heart.
At thirteen, David was proud of his vocabulary. He knew what ‘solipsism’ meant, and he was a ‘solipsist’, although he preferred to think of himself as an ‘egomaniac’, it sounded cooler; and, being a solipsistic egomaniac, he suspected that everything he’d ever experienced was created by his subconscious and only he was real.