Publisher: Culture Matters, 2022 | ISBN: 978-1-912710-46-1 | Format: 21.2x14.8cm paperback | Length: 236 text, 27 colour and 29 B&W illustration pages | Price: £15 inc. P&P.
‘A vibrant anthology that does not merely reflect the internal differences within working-class solidarities in Wales, but actually substantiates and develops that diversity in its chorus of visual and textual voices. Ymlaen!’
Prof. Daniel G. Williams
‘The breadth and expanse of voices bellowing out from within this anthology is a staggering record of resistance.’
Rhea Seren Phillips, Nation Cymru
‘A fine book, notable for its message of unity through diversity.’
Jim Aitken, Morning Star
There is a sculpture outside the train station which serves the Country of the Blind. Cast in bronze, it shows the valley’s discoverer, standing almost at the crest of a crag with a young woman by his side. He gazes southward, past the station towards the mountains into which he made his escape, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun, the other holding the woman’s arm in guidance or support. The woman, bare-footed, is nursing a child. Her face is turned towards the ground, while surrounding them both is a sea of uplifted hands, grasping their ankles in supplication or treachery. A plaque in Roman script and Braille commemorates their names, Ricardo Núñez and Medina-Saroté, his lover, after whom the town is named.
The statue is regularly vandalised, and as regularly repaired. The nationalists, the Serenos, paint their slogans over the plinth or hammer them into the bronze in a kind of inverse Braille; they lock fetters round the wrists of those upturned hands, or they cover Núñez’s eyes with goats’ blood as though they have been gouged…
Dr Sarah Gallup is a clinical psychologist at the California Department of State Hospitals. She also runs a podcast exploring the history of mental health care and the stories of people who lived or worked Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals. In six recent episodes she reads from Dangerous Asylums...
Read postAll newsThe day was dull, rather misty, and wet under foot, but neither too warm nor too cold for walking. I began to think (without being especially aware that I was thinking) about the place of blood in Christian iconography, about the chapel in which I was raised, which seemed mildly obsessed with it...
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‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru
‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’
Annexe Magazine
‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com
‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’
Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review
Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.
‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’
Jim Perrin
‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’
Philip Gross
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price
Translated by Rob Mimpriss, with an introduction by E. Morgan Humphreys