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...

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023 For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam –...

Brian Robert Moore | Tolka, Web Only, June 2023 In Italy, no author is as commonly associated with auto-fiction – or with the murky limbo that exists between fiction and non-fiction – as Walter Siti. Through his first three novels, which formed a ‘fake autobiography’ culminating with Paradise Overload (Troppi paradisi) in 2006, Siti proved that the self can be as effective a means as any for probing the obsessions, ills and ecstasies that characterise contemporary Western society. Even as the figure of Walter Siti has moved into a secondary role in much of his writing, his novels have continued to meld an almost investigative rigor with emotional depth and a uniquely propulsive style. By portraying and deconstructing contemporary Italy from the inside, Siti’s writing has captured how no facet of modern life – even, or especially, love and sex – can exist detached from macro systems of money, media...

Eva O’Connor | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair...