Notes from a poet-in-residence for Prague UNESCO City of Literature

Sometimes you wake in your jacked cityto the Earth grinding its teeth and you weepat how raw the dawn has become. Today the clocks go forward and so do we.Forest conflagrations that were visible from spacewill cease as will the burning of bears like witches. Atolls that opened their petals and had coralsbleached for tourists in white linen…

As his latest collection, 'Hotel Petroleum' is published by Broken Sleep Books, Mark Fiddes talks to James Hartley.

It must be springtimebecause the fumigator in his operatic maskhas returned to the ornamental lake. He trails silver cloudsalong the shoreline to kill the tiger mosquitoswho come back hungrier every year. Out here, something happens in your blood.You lose your sense of Winter and gratitudefor the carnal smell of ditches. From your slippery rock in the Atlantic…

Hotel Petroleum is Mark Fiddes's fourth collection, structured as a journey in three movements, Arrival, Occupancy, and Departure, through a world of expat dislocation, geopolitical emergency, and the...

After that, they started eating everythingin the name of God or rights or self-determinationor the sanctity of their eggs.They repeated the story on TV news with a mapcharting the key waterways and obstructions.You could see the concrete rimed on their lips,and fragments of glass crusted along their hairlines.“Go with the Flow,”they said like it was a slogan.

The award-winning poet gives us a daily account of life in the Gulf these last few weeks.

Traffic gridlocks on the BR-116 into São Paulo and a burger box flies out of a passenger window. Two wood pigeons cool in the concrete shade of a brutalist carpark. An Italian waiter in Soho writes his phone number on a bill, flourishing the crossbar on his continental 7’s. A girl building a sandcastle on the beach near Cadiz starts a conversation with a crab about paradise.