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ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES

Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

Munster Literature Centre

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MONICA CORISH

Before moving from Dublin to North Leitrim in 2005, Monica Corish worked as a Health Adviser with a number of international development organisations, and travelled widely in Africa. Now she spends her time writing, painting, and leading writing and visual arts workshops in the North-West. Her poetry has been published in Books Ireland, Works Seven, Crannog and The Shop; she was the Featured Poet in the Spring 2009 edition of The Stinging Fly; her memoir writing has featured on the Quiet Quarter and on Sunday Miscellany; and she has just completed her first collection of poetry, with the aid of Writing Bursary Awards from the Arts Council and Leitrim Arts Office, and is looking for a publisher.

Surrogate Granny

For Dympna and The Bump

Eight weeks and five days, a drop of blood:

you who began as a shock are now the dearly beloved.

The doctor sends your mother for a foetal assessment, the technician

squeezes gel on your mother's belly, the dark circle of your mother's womb is still as small

as the round of my finger and thumb, in the round of darkness you lie

like the curled head of a fern.

The technician says The heart is beating, you're fine

your mother nods Yes I can see it

but I say Heart? What heart?

And then I see it

black-white

black-white

black-white

the merest

flicking

dot

.

.

.

©2009 Monica Corish

Author Links

Corish at Amherst Writers

An interview with Corish in the Donegal Democrat

'Unfinished', a Corish poem in Crannog

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