The Hythe Review first issue with OLH

We are thrilled to announce the publications of the first issue of The Hythe Review with the Open Library of Humanities. The Hythe Review joined OLH in 2025, when the Open Library of Humanities partnered with award-winning poetry publisher the87press to relaunch its flagship poetry journal.

The first issue includes one editorial, 13 pieces of poetry, 3 review essays, and one interview. Haider Al-Ghazali’s 'Obituary Poem for Fatima Hassouna' follows in a Palestinian tradition that often uses poetic verse in a funerary context. We include poems by Nasser Rabah, one of the great poets still living in Gaza. Sumia Juxun writes in response to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, while Shripad Sinnakaar speaks of caste, crows, and dark-blueish kohl. Anthony Vahni Capildeo presents four sharp new poems, while Jay Gao extracts for us several pages from his Bark, Archive, Splinter sequence, and Canisia Lubrin’s Bright Machine is also excerpted. New work can also be found from Sarah Lasoye, Tarik Dobbs, Iman Mersal, and Keston Sutherland. Sanna Wani and Manahil Bandukwala’s epistolary prose poem reflects on craft and migration beautifully, while the latest installment of Nathaniel Mackey’s ever-mesmerising Song of the Andoumboulou (325) will meet you too. Additionally, we are very pleased to republish three recent poems from Face Press by the great late modernist J. H. Prynne in honour of his passing.

Review essays include David Grundy on Harmony Holiday’s MAAFA, situating it in the radical tradition of Black poetics; Hina Baloch on Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s Trans Femme Futures; and Jumanah Younis on Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces. Kashif Sharma-Patel interviews Ammiel Alcalay reflecting on translation, modernism, and the ‘imperial abhorrences’ at work in West Asia and beyond.

The first issue of The Hythe Review can be accessed here: https://thehythereview.co.uk/issue/1944/info/
 
The Hythe Review provides a space for literary conversations to take shape, coalescing around our shared inheritance of modernism, marxism(s), anti-colonialism, anti-racism, environmentalism, and a commitment to building literary political community around publications—as has always been the case with the work of the87press. The journal publishes interviews between critics, editors, and authors/artists alongside essays and new works of poetry, working through commissioned work and, from their second issue onwards, open submissions which the journal will extend warmly to racialised/global majority authors and authors who are neurodiverse, LGBTQ+, and/or working-class. 

The Hythe Review is produced in partnership with the Open Library of Humanities and other funding bodies such as Arts Council England. 
 
About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led publisher of 38 diamond open access journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund, the organisation covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors. 

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