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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis)

@maxwallis.bsky.social

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📚 Max Wallis | Author of the Polari Prize-shortlisted Modern Love (2011) & Everything Everything (2016). 🖋️ Poems in The Rialto, Poetry Scotland, Spectator ✍️ Freelance journalist (The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph). 🌈 Gay, disabled, survivor.

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · Apr 17

WE GOT THE FUNDING! “I am writing to offer you a grant of £XX,XXX towards the costs of The Aftershock Review. Congratulations on your successful application.” THANK YOU EVERYONE. THANK YOU, CONTRIBUTORS. THANK YOU
@artscouncilengland.bsky.social

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 2h

www.aftershockreview.com/product-page...

Reposted by The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis)

Elizabeth Osmond @bethosmond.bsky.social · 14d

Delighted that @maxwallis.bsky.social has chosen a poem of mine for Aftershock Issue 2! It was first generated in @kimmoorepoet.bsky.social and @clareshawpoet.bsky.social ‘s excellent January writing hours- which was also where I got to hear of Max’s brilliant project !

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 2d

Tune into BBC Radio 4 Front Row tonight to hear about The Aftershock Review. ALSO - At age 36 I have passed my driving test! What a life you can live when you choose to live the one you want.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 7d

We have been awarded a £15,000 grant from the T S Eliot Foundation. Words can't explain what I'm feeling right now, but thank you to everyone who believes in us. And to all who see what recovery, survival, persistence and change can do. And most of all - to the poets who trust us with your words.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 13d

wonderful, Ian!

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 13d

Across her four poems in this issue Petit creates a sequence of maternal hauntings and survival visions. Each expands private trauma into ecological myth, so that memory is never flat but alive, unstable, and vast.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 13d

The eagle is witness. She calls for “an armistice between all the birds,” but cannot unsee what her laser vision has revealed. The act of looking itself becomes a wound, impossible to erase. That is the poet’s role too: to stare into the unbearable and transform it into myth that can be carried.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 13d

Hearts become roses, veins rivers that dry to deserts, skins crack to release scorpions. This is the surrealist trauma poetics that defines Petit’s work: the body re-imagined as landscape, its injuries rendered as forests, gardens, rivers, deserts.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 13d

War and armistice across a battleground of the body, the family unit and the environment itself. Petit’s images fuse the anatomical with the ecological. “She saw into the chests of newborns / where the twigs of lungs were torn.”

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 13d

In @pascalepetit.bsky.social's final, fourth, poem, What Eagle Saw, Petit turns her focus skyward. The eagle hovers above the neonatal ward, her vision both forensic and mythic, maternal and ecological. @rsliterature.bsky.social

aftershockpoetry.substack.com/p/what-eagle...

What Eagle Saw by Pascale Petit

VO by Max Wallis - 'Eagle looked down and with her laser vision / zoomed into the neonatal clinic.'

aftershockpoetry.substack.com

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Reposted by The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis)

Ian Duhig @ianduhig.bsky.social · 21d

Kathleen Ryan: Bad Lemon, Aventurine, smokey quartz, rhodonite, calcite, quartz, labradorite, green line jasper, kambaba jasper, pink opal, citrine, amethyst, rose quartz, agate, serpentine, pink lepidolite, malachite, mother of pearl, freshwater pearl, bone, glass, acrylic, steel pins, polystyrene

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

@pascalepetit.bsky.social @rsliterature.bsky.social @bloodaxebooks.bsky.social

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

aftershockpoetry.substack.com/p/catfish-by... @rsliterature.bsky.social @pascalepetit.bsky.social

Catfish by Pascale Petit

"My mother's face looms over me - a giant catfish / shattering outside my incubator, hundred-eyed and gilled" - Read by Max Wallis

aftershockpoetry.substack.com

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

Read alongside My Mother’s Provençal Dress and House of Puberty, Catfish extends a triptych of maternal hauntings. Each poem stitches a different landscape into the body of the mother: vineyard, rainforest, river. Each expands the intimate wound into a myth of survival.

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

The poem insists that even in the most precarious beginnings, myth can hold what memory cannot.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

This is Petit’s genius. She shows us how the imagination does not escape the unbearable but remakes it. The infant’s terror is re-envisioned as a kaleidoscope of wings, a river of detritus, a mouth clasped by an anaconda pumping oxygen like blood.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

Petit collapses human, animal, and ecological registers so that trauma is never individual. It is cosmic, planetary. The incubator, like the rainforest, is fragile, perilous, and full of creatures that both endanger and sustain.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

What is striking is the double inheritance. The mother’s body, “gashed by my birth,” is also a forest bleeding into storm. The incubator becomes a raft on boiling glass, swirling in whirlpools.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

Already the ordinary dissolves. The consultant is a king vulture, his wattle a stethoscope. Oxygen itself becomes an anaconda clasped to the infant’s mouth. Survival is figured through a surrealist bestiary, each image carrying both threat and protection.

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

Instead, the scene becomes a river, a forest, an underworld-in-glass populated by catfish, caimans, vultures, anacondas. The newborn’s first vision is not of medicine, but of myth.

“My mother’s face looms over me – a giant catfish / shattering outside my incubator, hundred-eyed and gilled.”

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 21d

In Catfish, Pascale Petit’s third poem, we are taken back to the very beginning: the hospital ward, the incubator, the first wound of birth. Yet the poem refuses any clinical language. Ihttps://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/p/catfish-by-pascale-petit

Catfish by Pascale Petit

"My mother's face looms over me - a giant catfish / shattering outside my incubator, hundred-eyed and gilled" - Read by Max Wallis

aftershockpoetry.substack.com

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The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 24d

And Issue Two? It’s even bigger, with 60+ poets, all new sections, and a remarkable new generation of voices.

aftershockpoetry.substack.com/p/an-aftersh...

An Aftershock Update - and 30% off orders until the end of September!

Plus new tiers for the substack!

aftershockpoetry.substack.com

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 24d

Hit 7,500 podcast downloads and 90,000 Instagram impressions in the last 90 days - 500,000 impressions in total from the start of this project.

Secured five-figure Arts Council funding

Been named Poetry Book Society Book of the Week and shortlisted for the Hatch Launchpad 2025

An Aftershock Update - and 30% off orders until the end of September!

Plus new tiers for the substack!

aftershockpoetry.substack.com

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 24d

Thanks to you, we’ve:

Reached 55,000+ Substack views, with each poem read 500–1,000 times by email

Sold £3,500 in magazines from a single Guardian feature www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

‘How can I find meaning from the ruins of my life?’: the little magazine with a life-changing impact

After struggles with mental health and addiction, Max Wallis launched a poetry magazine – and it has transformed his life

www.theguardian.com

The Aftershock Review (Max Wallis) @maxwallis.bsky.social · 24d

When I launched The Aftershock Review I never expected the response we’ve had. What began bedbound grew into a magazine that sold out multiple print runs, reached one million+ potential readers in 3 months, and has been featured in The Guardian, The Bookseller, and soon The Times and Front Row.

An Aftershock Update - and 30% off orders until the end of September!

Plus new tiers for the substack!

aftershockpoetry.substack.com

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