Joel Glover

I'm a Leicester lad transplanted to rural Hertfordshire. I live in a farm cottage with my two boys and wife, assailed constantly by peculiar and idiosyncratic English wildlife. Not a week goes by without some sort of story about an animal straight out of a kids book.

On poetry & writing

I'm not claiming any particular revelatory or unique insight here when I say that poetry is the way humans tell stories. The things that make a poem a poem, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, allusion, metre, all contribute to making the story cling to our brains in ways that are satisfying. I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, burrowing through the histories upon which those genres are founded, and of course it's all poetry when you get to the beginnings. My mum is a big reader, and it is her collection that I gorged on. My dad is also a huge influence on the writer I aspire to be, both because he would (unprompted) disgorge armfuls of books into my room, and put up shelves to help me clear my floor, but also because his musical taste has a particularly verbal bent that is the rootstock onto which my own taste was grafted. 

Later I studied French at university, and expanded my canon out into another language.

When I write, then, I'm pulled in two directions at once. One one pole is the formal, the historic, the (whisper it) literary. But at the other end is John Cooper Clarke, and Tom Robinson, sitting with Pratchett and Chandler, Pat Rotfhfuss and Glen Cook, Benjamin Zephaniah and Inspectah Deck. I want to make jokes, and make the reader smile, I want to tell weird stories. I want to write with a deliberateness that is completely hidden within the work itself. I may even succeed from time to time. 

I have been fortunate enough to have work of all shapes and sizes picked up. I have had short stories in anthologies and journals, some non-fiction and reviews are out there, and poetry of all shapes and sizes scattered across all corners of the internet. I have stories for children, some of which I have read into my YouTube channel, and novels which are definitively not for children self-published.

Check out my linktree http://linktree.com/joelgloverauthor for more, and here are some recommendations of things I've liked over the last couple of years:

Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands - By Felix - Taco Bell Quarterly

Time Travel Body - By Angel Leal - Radon (Issue 8)

Bone-Eater Earth - By Emma Burnett - Uncharted Mag

A cup to save the world - By Andrea Cavedo - foofaraw
[wondering what] and Other Haiku - By Kat Lehmann - Rattle