Editor
I founded Vesica Press because the work I most wanted to read did not have a home.
I am a surrealist poet and doctoral researcher in psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex, where my thesis explores the alchemical structure of surrealist automatism. I am also the founder of Vesica Press. My own work sits in the overlap between the creative and the critical - between poetry and theory, between practice and research - and refuses to stay in either.
Hypnagogic Peacock exists for work like mine and unlike mine. Work that has followed a problem somewhere the available categories could not follow it. Work that is constituted by its in-between-ness - that could only exist in the space between its elements.
The selection criteria I bring to every submission are drawn from my own practice and from the writers who have shaped it. I published them in full in the essay It Trains the Eye: Reading Claude Cahun's Disavowals as a Vesical Editor, which is freely available on the Vesica Press Substack. The chief criterion, as Cahun would have it: I cannot name it.
Every submission is read seriously. Every submitter receives a personal response.