While restrictions abounded in 2021, this year’s Manchester Anthology affirms the power of literature to push boundaries, subvert rules and chart new ground.
Poems whose ‘glistening, knife’s-edge’ lines dissect the lost innocence of young love and map pulsations of fresh desire. Creative non-fiction that mines as much hope from the weeding of back gardens as it does from an escape to the sun-drenched Key West. Stories that walk the line between dreams and reality, guilt and innocence, endings and new beginnings.
In the words of a character featured herein, this collection is ‘anything but ordinary’.