Award-winning poet Jessica Traynor joins Banshee as poetry editor

We’re delighted to announce an addition to the Banshee team: award-winning poet Jessica Traynor. Having guest-edited the poetry in issue #12, Jessica has joined the Banshee masthead as our poetry editor going forward. We’re thrilled to have a writer and editor of Jessica’s calibre overseeing our poetry, and can’t wait to read the incredible work she will unearth.

To find out more about what Jessica is looking for, it’s worth revisiting her call-out for work ahead of issue #12:

The poetry that excites me most is the poetry that lures me somewhere pleasant, only to frighten me a bit by allowing me a glimpse of the uncanny reflection in the mirror, the hint of confrontation in a glance, the encroaching rot in the fruit bowl. It’s also the poetry that deals with difficult, unspoken thoughts – unspoken not necessarily because they are romantic or beautiful, but because they threaten to reveal our inner chaos, to spill it out into the world.

Poetry as celebration is one of the purest forms of expression. But let’s leave that aside for a moment and poke around in the mud and blood and guts of life. Human beings are messy and complicated and contradictory. We’re surrounded by hills and valleys and beautiful clear ocean vistas, but also by rotting leaves and sewage treatment plants and immortal, invasive micro-plastics. I’d like to see poems that rummage around in all that, yet still manage to unearth, as Maggie Smith puts it, some ‘good bones’.

Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut poetry collection, Liffey Swim, was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. Awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. Paper Boat, a new opera commission from Irish National Opera, will premiere in 2022. Residencies in 2021-22 include the Yeats Society Sligo, the Seamus Heaney Home Place and the DLR LexIcon. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, will be published by Bloodaxe Books in March 2022, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.