Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Seven, July 2025 The poets K and G live on neighbouring islands. They have never met, but they follow each other’s writing and know the look of each other’s haircuts, vacations, spouses, G’s child and K’s nieces and her friends’ children who chalk her garden walls, pots and statues with flowers, faces and I RULE. The two poets know the look of their mutual commitment to bodybuilding. The two poets write about traumatic historical and personal events. Rather than coming up with their own words, they locate language that has been used already to write or speak about these terrible things. They carefully separate parts of this language from the body of the texts, shaping it to reveal the form of what is really there, what is really felt. Eventually another poet remarked upon their respective gym photos and suggested that K and G write...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, January 2024 ‘The fawn looked at me, batting four sets of lashes, giving disarming smile. Off he went, hustling around the bandstand, rattling the local blue tits to the core.’ Isabel Waidner’s latest novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility (2023), spans prize culture, notions of social mobility, wormholes, daytime telly and, perhaps most memorably, an eight-legged Bambi. Waidner’s previously published work includes Gaudy Bauble (2017), Liberating the Canon (2018), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Sterling Karat Gold (2021), which won the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize. Corey Fah, like Waidner, is a writer who has won a literary prize – in Corey’s case, ‘The Award for the Fictionalization of Social Evils’. But Corey Fah struggles to collect the prize, which takes the form of a UFO that hovers just out of reach.  After failing to collect the prize, Corey Fah returns home to...

Moya Lothian-McLean | Tolka, Issue Three, August 2022 Emma Dabiri and I are talking at opposite ends of the day. In Pennsylvania, where the Dublin-born scholar and broadcaster is currently teaching, it’s 11 a.m.; for me, the evening is drawing close. But Dabiri is energised; it’s the third occasion (by my count) that we’ve been thrown together in an interview context and yet she always finds a new, fascinating thread of thought during our interactions. Dabiri is a multi-discipline thinker. While her work fits into rich traditions of radical perspectives, her areas of interest – Black feminism, the Black–Irish experience, intersecting histories of oppression, marginalised history, to name but a few – are often underexplored. It’s why her non-fiction interventions have become such landmark works. Her first, Don’t Touch My Hair (2019), is well on its way to modern-classic status as a creative text, marrying academic research, personal experience and...

Erin Dorney | Tolka Issue Three, January 2025 Day 3 Dear Adriene, Female bears sleep right through birth. You say, give your littlebelly a pet – you say, smear a little honey across the ribcage – butvisualise for me waking up, unaware of any sign of danger, withsore teats and tiny eyes you can’t escape. I’ve never wanted notto be a mother more than now, half-asleep with heat. Instead,I claim this fusty cave, a lunar flag ‘waving’. You say, notice howyou feel, and I assure you, I’ve been trying. Day 4 Dear Adriene, Teach me how to talk to invisible things. How to measureshoreline length. Focus on a steady state. How can some thingstwist in my mind like morning glories? I think I am invasive.I keep saying no but you grow into all my empty spaces. Dearones, how you multiply. Day 21 Dear Adriene, What are you waiting for? A...