Shows
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)The Immovable Stance by Helen IvoryBuy the book here: https://www.aftershockreview.com/product-page/issue-1-the-aftershock-reviewListen to our Daily Aftershock Podcast here: https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/s/the-daily-aftershock-writing-promptA Note from the Editor:Here, we see how memory lands like a backfist. The Immovable Stance offers no neat redemption arc, only the weight of a father's words and the off-kilter balance of inherited harm. Shotokan Karate’s fudo-dachi becomes more than a posture here: it’s the grim theatre of masculinity, of who gets to stay rooted and who is scattered. But it’s also about patriarchal unrave...2025-04-3001 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)The Snow Globe by Helen IvoryThe Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the magazine, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A Note from the Editor:Helen Ivory’s third poem in our inaugural issue Snow Globe holds a different kind of cold. Not the sharpness of winter, but the slow, creeping frost of neglect—the way intimacy can harden over time into something you don’t recognise. You think you’re surviving it, lighting fairy lights inside a dead hearth, sipping Cristal out of tulip glasses, waiting for warmth to retur...2025-04-2901 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)That Friday Afternoon by Helen IvoryThe Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A Note from the Editor, exclusive to Substack:Helen Ivory’s second poem in Issue One of The Aftershock Review (£12.99) made me somersault at my desk. That Friday Afternoon accomplishes something extraordinary. It lingers in the way trauma does — how certain memories don’t survive as stories, but as textures worn into the walls and floors of a life lived in extremis.This poem refuses to shout. It lets...2025-04-2801 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Why I Called Him Bluebeard by Helen IvoryA note from the Editor:When I first read this poem, I sat very still. I thought of all the times we’ve needed myth to say what felt unsayable. How story can be a mask, but also a mirror. Helen Ivory’s Why I Called Him Bluebeard doesn’t flinch. It moves through fear, memory, and language with astonishing clarity. It just had to open our inaugural issue. Here, poetry becomes a spell, an unmaking, and a reckoning. — Max WallisWhy I Called Him Bluebeardby Helen Ivory | poet | artist Bec...2025-04-2500 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Section I - Opening Tremors / Naming the Damage - (Meet the contributors!)Opening Tremors / Naming the DamageWe begin where it begins: with rupture. The poems in this first section speak from the brink, in the language of impact, aftermath, and the moment something breaks. This is where the damage is named. Not to retraumatise, but to mark its outline, to say this happened. These poems are raw-boned, necessary, unflinching. They give shape to the unspeakable, refusing the silence that so often follows trauma. This is the first tremor, the shock before the aftershock. The moment the world tilts, and you know nothing will ever be the same again.2025-04-2402 min