The Nottingham Review incorporating WOODCHIPPER. Click to read Nottingham Review, by Shaun Belcher, a Substack publication. Launched 12 days ago.

Delivered 5th July 2025 Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, which is showing One Self: The Creative Life of Colin Self until 21st Sept 2025  Playlist: As Tears Go By (June 1964)Paint It Black (May 1966)Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (May 1967)We Love You (August 1967)I Want To Hang Out With Ed Ruscha (2000)Eve Of Destruction…

Moons and Wolves

So here we are February 2026 with a new magazibe and a new editor but same old ethos (almost). Three factors combined to lead to changes at what was CL (cannot use word) Towers . For the second time substack closed down the CL related review and it turned out that the word CL is in fact related to a insidious spam and phishing technique and has led to us being blocked across platforms.

FILM, MUSIC AND POPULAR CULTURE

Until I watched Lamberto Bava’s ‘A Blade in the Dark’, my favourite line of dialogue in a giallo was a straight toss-up between “Right, send in the perverts” (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and “I killed them because they were dolls, just stupid dolls” (Torso). I now have not one but two lines of dialogue – from the same film – that challenge these.

Listen now | THE CARNIVAL IS OVER

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11 track album

What do you need for the perfect Christmas Day? Quick checklist: family around you  a bloody big turkey in the oven  oceanic quantities of booze  a shiny new electric train set  simmering hate-fuck sexual tension between the adults  a cold blast of existential despair  “Wait, what?” I hear you cry, having reached the last two of those. Since when have simmering hate-fuck sexual tension and existential despair been constituent parts of the essential Yuletide experience?

In the Beginning Star begins the songbreaking her strings from untimed waitingagitating the void, calling along constellations, grazing unknown suns.Chords gather, surge with the tides, grating,rattling the shore, breaking into runs to meet utterance. Now there are words;mountains, sheep, angel, a story starting like firein the wind. ‘Now, now’ sing the birds in the city’s trees.

An established figure on the East Midlands literary scene as one half (with Birgit Friedrich) of the poetry collective Dandelions, Caroline Stancer makes her publishing debut with Full Body Reclaim, a handsomely produced pamphlet in Five Leaves’ New Poetry series. Whereas many first volumes hint at a voice beginning to find itself, or something taking shape that points towards the promise of the future (“Critics, hold your fire,” as Vernon Scannell put it: “the best is yet to come”), what we have here is more like a showreel: a confident demonstration of Stancer’s talent and capabilities.