Poet and critic Sean Bonney was born in Brighton, England. He grew up in the north of England and lived in London for much of his life. A poet of protest, a poet of the picket line, the punk show, and the deep lyric, Sean Bonney performed his poems with a bloody radiance that held the weight of his political commitment and lyric brilliance. Heavily influenced by the British Poetry Revival of the 60s and 70s, as well as the poetics of Amiri Baraka, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Pier Pasolini, and a host of other radical writers—his was a poetics of refusal, of revolution, and of ceaseless pressure. Bent by the brutal reality of living under capitalism, Bonney’s lyric mode was one of anger, compression, and radiant refusal.

Little Mirror hopes to pay tribute to Bonney’s work, the way he braided his poetics with his praxis, his uncompromising commitment to addressing the world as it is—fucked up as it is, beautiful as it is—and to invite poets and thinkers to celebrate, recapitulate, and think through Bonney’s complicated and generative poetics. From intimate memorializations, to letters to the editors, to discourse generated from the work itself, we hope to bring Bonney’s necessary voice to the forefront of contemporary poetic discourse.