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'Someone’s rhythm sneaking in again. Sharing a language. The osmosis of rubbing up. Communing.' (Kathleen Fraser) Ed. Briony Hughes, Cat Chong osmosispress.com

✨ Open Call: Osmosis Journal — Issue 1: "OSMOSIS" ✨ We are excited to announce the open call for the inaugural issue of Osmosis Journal. For more details on submission guidelines, check out the link in our bio!

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✨ Open Call: Osmosis Journal — Issue 1: "OSMOSIS" ✨ We are excited to announce the open call for the inaugural issue of Osmosis Journal. For more details on submission guidelines, check out the link in our bio!

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Next week, join Tamsyn Challenger as she celebrates the publication of Him Hymn at the Hungarian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. The event is kindly supported by the University of Glasgow's Creative Writing Programme and organized by the wonderful Colin Herd!

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We are overjoyed to welcome Tamsyn Challenger’s tender, unflinching, and urgent Him Hymn into the world today! This publication is Challenger’s debut book of poetry, written with an incredible commitment to an intimate and luminous lyric I💙

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PREORDER ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 IT FEELS SO GOOD TO BE BACK! This month, Tamsyn Challenger’s ‘Him Hymn’ and Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s ‘Grief is the Thing in Pleather’ will be released on 25th and 26th respectively🖤

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This week Osmosis is so excited to be featuring an extract from the forthcoming collection 'Grief is a Thing in Pleather' by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain! Writing back to Emily Dickinson’s figure of death in ‘because I could not stop for death’ alongside Wiz Khalifa’s character (1/4)

   *

When your engine finally gives out 	Death pulls up, kicks his
door wide open, says 	Ride or Die. 	You choose both. Close up
his face is not handsome, a buzz of flies. 	There’s 		a
waterproof hat in the back, wide rimmed 	and when a fly stops at
your ear 	you ask it, why do you stay?
To be as regal as the buzzard one day 	it	 replies 		as 	if
the bounty hunter can confer carrion pride to everything he touches
   *
You will crash, or
You will run out of gas
Both are an ending.
   *

This week, interrupting our typical weekly Featured Writing schedule as we’re incredibly announce Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain’s latest collection will be forthcoming from Osmosis Press this October 2025! This collection is a consideration of and a writing through what it means to live (1/5)

Grief is a Thing with Pleather by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain in white writing on a black background surrounded by white drawings of flies.

This week in the Osmosis Featured Writing series, ‘la máquina se turna’ in the ‘omnicultural / revolution’ by Samuel Haecker. This visual poem revolves, subverting the linear conventions of poems written in English; ‘caressing mouths fed regrowth’ are ‘littering rejuvenation’ as (1/3)

omnicultural
revolution

trial
decomposed fathers littering rejuvenation
wir kommen wir kommen wir kommen
caressing mouths fed regrowth
valórame las artificias de hierro
brain
cycle printed formalities
niemandsland begraben außerhalb
stamen
molten steel shaped of nettles
puestos de lata se comen la hora
paranoia
blooms are machinist suns
bringe das Land es schwimmte alleine
circuit
boarded up aiming for fingers splinterless
querida patria me mato las manos
string
extensions of artificial honesty
pflanzlich geschmolzen ohne Riss
wool
is health without instruments
boca adolorida la máquina se turna

This week, Osmosis is ‘upended on top of a green sofa with its seams burst’ in this hybrid experimental text by EK Myerson titled ‘what happens when a list takes on water?’. ‘[N]ow this is a list with legs’, they write, referring to listing as the ‘nautical term to describe when a vessel (1/3)

[3] I spent yesterday afternoon drawing these images in biro on a sheet of spare paper, which I had torn and folded into a rough fortune teller. Origami fortune tellers were very popular when I was in primary school but I hadn’t made one in years, so I had to google the template. These are the hidden fortunes of my Zodiac square:
Pisces I: “reality is…the skin of an egg” – Etel Adan, Surge
Taurus II: “the spread of unscheduled eating as an aspect of modern life” – Sidney Mintz
Taurus III: “the committee of management have, in one act, labelled their course both philanthropic & cosmopolitan” – Frederick Douglass
Capricorn IV: “Resonance is a biscuit / snap it into / and dunk it in your tea” – Bhanu Kapil
Capricorn V: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” – Edward Said, Reflections on Exile
Aquarius VI: “processes of substitution, opposition, replacement & transformation amount to the very mechanism of industrial capitalist modernity” – Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds
Aquarius VII: “Should the novel that is never published still have been written? Of course it should” – Phyllida Barlow
Pisces VIII: “To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to keep my glasses clean” – Fred Moten, Black & Blur

This week, Osmosis is watching the ‘intermittent spread of drifting cargo ships and the spinning of wind turbines dotting the horizon’ in JD Howse’s ‘Picture of Gray (1922), Henry Scott Tuke’. In this lacerating, evocative, and thinly veiled work of (1/8)

Joseph watched it all happen on television. He was lying in the dark, lit only by the light of the screen, curled up into a foetal little ball on his bed. He pulled the blankets tighter around him and felt salt sting the rotting corners of his sunken eyes, rolling down the broken ridge of his nose and onto his dry, chapped lips. “I knew it,” he whispered, “I hate myself, I hate everything, I want to die, I want to be loved.” 
I am sorry, I love you. There is nothing else to say. I feel like I’m getting there, and then it falls apart. It’s impossible to tell if that’s choking or laughing. Consider the hedgehog, huddling up against another hedgehog for warmth, and in the process hurting the other hedgehog and likewise being hurt in turn. The water filled his mouth and he dreamed.

This week, Osmosis is ‘being altered by / my phone the way I / seek stimulus behind it’ in Cogito Ergo by Will Staveley. ‘This is why I travel light’, Staveley writes, offering a litany of quotidian activities ‘ for escape / which is crucially (1/7)

why I                                                         smoke
                                                                 clench jaw
                                                                 tense
                                                                 stay in bed

______________for escape
which is        crucially never ____________just
____________________________________________________to be silent

but                   I need it
                                                    music                 light
___________________________________________________reel
______ desire
_______________ substance                                       or just the promise
_______________ to make it                                      all
__________________________________________________________________ seem worthwhile

This week, Osmosis is ‘loitering / amid hyacinths and trying to remember / the movements of desire that terrified me’ in the poems ‘Cankerblossom’ and ‘Notes for a Lecture’ by Luce Lovell. In these poems about ‘market integration for this body politique, / circling (1/5)

I was bipedal and awkward,
the canary in a diamond mine.
What use is there for warning calls
when danger glitters in the macro-
structures of a lifetime? I never cared for
Deleuze or Guattari to my friend’s dismay.
Instead, I would dream of getting railed
on a linear bridge, or charting out a life
at relevant checkpoints over the Stour.
Something to return to once the worst
had passed. The shadows & breakages.
I won’t get lost in the rhizome. Not again.
Not again. And once again, I lapse out
at the kindest people I know.

This week, Osmosis is enthralled by the cave markings within the Cueva de Ardales, Spain in Michael Sutton’s poem Fragments from the Oath of Cave Ardales. Inside, more than 1,000 engravings and red paintings dot its walls, ceilings, ground rocks, and other natural features, having (1/4)

[________________________________________] voices, vortices
[________________________________________] in mourning
[________________________________________]
[________________________________________]

(gap partly filled, partly overlapped by the following fragments
found on a splattered stalagmite)

Walk past the disembowelled crane. Should I
remember this forever? [________________________]

Then, no, leave it
alone. Let go of the feathers
__The pattern of the feathers [
_))_______] a mirror of immense length

This week Osmosis is riding ‘the old white bike our from the shed’ alongside this week’s protagonist in The Hermit Woman Bikes and Her Visitation by Catherine Hobbs. As a piece of fiction that plays with visual poetry techniques, this week’s featured writing piece is a stand-alone episode (1/3)

A<
` \~`<t cr>chT |
^* ClaT ~. *
^>^
the old white bike out from the shed and drag it laboriously by its rusted frame across the
Hoist UP, struggle for the peddles. DAMN!
DAMN!
Wob
Ble
then wend dangerously up the gravel schur.rrrru u . ` u u . ` . . . u . k .
Almost turfed off
turning onto the road,
leaving Deepwood
behind
on the left.
Thankfully, no one about. Mangey and hunched: ride on as a perf orming circus bear.
The woods appear soft, benign and uninhabited all around, although feel keenly that eyes
may be peering out from their cottages at this spectacle. Huh huhh huhh, straiN up the
modest hill between Kingswood and Moorside

This week, Osmosis is witnessing the ‘origin moment’ of the universe, which ‘forged heaven beside little planet sphere’ in the poem ORIGIN: Yahweh Forges Entire Cosmos by Greg Hill. This work rewrites Chapter One of the Book of Genesis using only six-letter words, in a strikingly Oulipian (1/3)

1 During origin moment, YAHWEH forged heaven beside little planet sphere. 2 Planet missed having formal format; entire planet shaded inside opaque waters. Thusly, spirit within YAHWEH glided onward beyond opaque waters. 3 Thusly YAHWEH stated, “Behold! Appear lights!” Thence lights formed around YAHWEH. 4 YAHWEH beheld lights, called entire design superb. “Hooray! Extant things tickle Jovian senses. Enough! Moving onward.” YAHWEH placed lights amidst opaque waters. 5 YAHWEH called lights Waking Period; YAHWEH called opaque waters Nights. Sunset beside morrow entire became single cosmic period.

This week Osmosis is delighted to feature an excerpt from 'The Rat Man' by Lucie Staniek. Opening with a quotation from Literature and Error: A Literary take on Mistakes and Errors, this ‘post-critical essay’ focuses its attention on the ‘“Nixon slip”’. As Nixon himself (1/6)

‘“Error is associated with an unavoidable ignorance, ― when one gropes, so to speak, in the dark.”’1

Ruch states that a Freudian slip, is different to an error in the sense that, dissimilarly to an error, a slip ‘allows the transfer of extra, relevant information.’ It permits the listener to interpret, ‘extra information that the speaker did not consciously intend to transmit but is nonetheless relevant to the message.’2 The Freudian slip gives “context” to the error that has been made, which could arguably, change the listener’s interpretation on the said mistake.

This week, Osmosis is venturing underground in Olya K-Mehri’s The Soil Does Not Approve of What Is Happening Below. While this poem evocatively charts the movement of the roots, ‘like they’ve heard rumours of fire and want to meet it halfway’, Mehri’s poem looks at the ground as a place (1/3)

There is no such thing as stillness underground—only waiting with teeth.
They do not care for your gardens. They remember forests like war.
Each one carries a secret it stole from the last thing it touched.
If you could hear them, you’d swear the soil was cracking jokes in a language now extinct.
When they finally rise, we will mistake them for something holy.

This week Osmosis is moving amongst the ‘words [as they] sprout along the inner walls of the womb’ in this week’s scripto-visual piece titled ‘Thāi-mozhi/ തായ്മൊഴി’ by M. P. Pratheesh. ‘[B]reathe. grow. move’ the poem instructs as ‘time preserves nothing’ and ‘disappears (1/2)

Malayalam words scribbled in acrylic ink on terracotta shards of a broken pot are layed on top of twigs and white cotton cloth.

This week, Osmosis is delighted to be part of the process of ‘mak[ing] your own Easter bread, kozunak’ in the poem How to prove you still belong by Kapka Nilan. Written after the process of baking Cozonac or Kozunak, a sweet yeast dough that can be used to make various traditional (1/6)

and you just can’t knead any more or braid, sticky dough all over your fingers and on the floor in your far away kitchen but the lemon zest and vanilla take you back home where you don’t seem to belong, and someone might say ‘well done’ when they see a photo of your labour, hopefully, well risen and authentic and beautiful enough, and you’ll know, even if no one says it, that you still belong, and finally see

the basket full of fruit that is now your life