#IndieLitMagGala 2025 Spotlight: ALOCASIA Journal
Alan Parry
October 13, 2025
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
I’ve always believed the city speaks loudest when the world’s gone quiet. When the office lights blink out, the shutters roll down, and the streets start telling stories that don’t get airtime in daylight. That’s where Glow: City at Night Poetry was born, in that hush, in that hum, in that strange beauty found only after hours.
As editor—and as the author of the opening poem, At Night There Is No Logic—I wanted to build a collection that didn’t just capture city nights, but lived them. Poems that don’t flinch. Poems that roll with the drunks, lock eyes with the ghosts, flirt with danger, and walk home alone under streetlamps flickering like dying stars. My poem opens the book with ‘a dog so large it looks like a hundred dogs’ prowling the subways. That image, I hope, sums up the mood of this collection: surreal, grimy, mythic, and somehow still intimate.
Glow brings together dozens of poets from across the UK, the US, and beyond. Some are long-time collaborators. Others are voices I’ve admired from afar—each one writing with their own kind of urgency. From Jude Brigley’s luminous travelogue That Summer, Without Money… to Sara Stegen’s quiet devastation in Warzone Windows, these poems arrive raw, charged, and utterly unfiltered.
Chris Campbell’s Revellers Howl in the Fine Hours gives us the city’s morning-after—the half-shameful, half-sacred space where the bins are overflowing, kids are fighting over doughnuts, and an old man waits with dignity while the chaos rages around him. In contrast, Erich von Hungen’s Walking Two Blocks is a wild jazz solo of a poem, bursting with scent, sound, and soul. It’s not just about walking—it’s about being consumed, atomised, reassembled by the metropolis.
There are no soft landings in this book. No tidy metaphors or sunset endings. This is poetry as witness, poetry as collision. You’ll meet commuters with cracked voices, foxes sprinting past kebab wrappers, lovers in cab backseats trying not to touch, and cities that never stop speaking, even when no one’s listening.
We release on 28 April 2025, and I promise you: this isn’t a book that asks for permission. It’s a late-night knock at the door. A last cigarette you shouldn’t have smoked. A streetlamp flickering above a city that might just devour you—or save you.
Glow is nearly here. And when it lands, I hope it keeps you up.
There’s something rare and steady about a journal that knows exactly what it is—and makes no apologies for it. ALOCASIA is one
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.