Call for Poetry Submissions

We are very happy to announce that Berfrois is currently welcoming Poetry Submissions...

Wilt thou rob this leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, non-pated, agate-ring, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue Spanish pouch?

It is scarcely surprising that Shakespeare’s powerful words and images – the precious stone set in the silver sea –would later be enlisted to boost morale and stir national pride...

Dada was not a stable concept that could be reinitiated untransformed, nor was montage a static category...

In pandemic times I’m picturing Jason Fearn sat amongst his chaotic equipment, formulating a sinister and foreboding soundtrack...

How the Art World Worked in a Non-market Context

Klara Kemp-Welch’s latest book, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981, challenges the idea of unconnected isolated art production

Work No. 227: The lights going on and off consists entirely of an empty white-walled gallery in which the lights flicker off and on for five seconds apiece.

Screenshot from “Scream” video, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Epic Records, 1994 by Francesco Tenaglia It only lasts for a moment. Not a glutinous efflorescence, or a spooky appearance fit to star in choreography from the good ol’ days. The sluggish shadow slippers from one...

Atomic Garden, an experimental film by Ana Vaz, opens with a purely textual prologue: Aoki Sadako, an elderly Japanese woman, visits her flower garden...

Jesse Miksic: Robert Graves’ Mythology in Tokyo-3 and Fódlan

The boy walks slowly across the wasteland, a lone figure—eyes in shadow, looking vaguely at his feet, but knowing, somehow, where he is going.

Biennales are experiments with proximity. They reconfigure spaces with art, sound or bodies, temporarily disrupting the usual rhythms of their host environments. In Lahore...

The first image in Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela is an empty street at night, from which a few headstones marking a cemetery are visible.

Stormzy’s love of Magic is sincere and profound – and sometimes it cannot be contained. A year earlier, at the Mercury prize...

Holding down the fast forward button on your CD player, eventually the sound of a mysterious hidden track would rush by. An all-too-quick blur of noise. Then you'd have to skip back a bit to get to the start of the song.

Éliane Radigue’s three-part composition Trilogie de la Mort is a masterwork on passages through death and life, grief and rebirth. Subtle and potent, it is built upon the amplification of sounds that oscillate, spiral, hiss, recede and swell.

A year ago, I came across an article by Stephen Elliott, a writer I’d admired. There were plenty of disturbing things about the piece

I first read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy as a young teen; it felt like a revelation. The books had a rough-textured animal-breath closeness that I had rarely encountered before...

In the 1980s, having a poster of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in my college dorm room made me feel sophisticated and grown-up: I’m living in New York, it announced....

Byung-Chul Han’s writing breezes across the pages of Shanzhai. Laconic in style and concise in argument, this short book briefly outlines and illustrates some deceptively intricate arguments...

Ten years have passed since poet, essayist and interviewer Russell Bennetts founded Berfrois, drawing its rather gallic name from the Old English term for the dais on which jousts were viewed.

You materialize at a sprawling ranch near a snowcapped mountain covered with freshly powdered pines. Three horses graze nearby behind a purplish wooden fence.

Susanna Crossman: Riding the Baking Edge #1

The recipe for this French gâteau au chocolat came scrawled on a damp piece of paper, handed to me, along with a wink, a scowl and a bag of oysters, by Albertine, a sea-captain’s wife...

Just across the street, there was the video game parlor. I call it that because it was not really an arcade, though some of the features were shared: a variety of consoles. It was called ABC studios...

Meaningful Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence

In African Freedom, Phyllis Taoua offers a study of “meaningful freedom” in Africa since independence from the perspective of literary studies...

‘from An Explanation of America: Countries and Explanations’ by Robert Pinsky

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face.

‘Home Thoughts from Aboard Continental Flight 94’ by Daniel Bosch