Transgression isn’t provocation. It’s not about being edgy. It’s about truth-telling when every instinct screams “don’t.” It’s the line that makes your stomach drop. The one you flinch over before hitting “send.” The one that might be misunderstood, or ignored, but insists on being said anyway.
At The Broken Spine, transgression isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s a necessity. It’s writing that crosses lines not for clout, but because the truth lives on the other side. It’s the moment you stop writing to be clapped, and start writing to bleed.
Transgression wears different skins. It might be:
And let’s be clear: transgression isn’t shock. Shock is cheap, subjective, and forgettable. This is about freedom. The freedom to abandon mimicry. To make something that doesn’t care if it’s understood, liked, or safe.
I have this idea that I can’t shake: that too much poetry right now is too tidy. Polished. Palatable. It’s often trying to sound like someone else: Plath, Jericho Brown, William Carlos Williams. And I know some wonderful writers. But here’s the thing they should know: cosplay isn’t creation. We don’t need echoes. We need the full-throated, possibly-uncomfortable, definitely-messy you.
So if you’re still writing for approval, maybe this isn’t for you. But if you’re done waiting for permission? Then let’s look at what this kind of writing can be.
A working-class, anti-colonial epic that spits patois and refuses translation.
Johnson doesn’t write poetry that begs for understanding, he writes poetry that demands your full attention or leaves you behind. Inglan is a Bitch is political not because of its subject, but because of its refusal: to translate, to explain, to code-switch. Words like phu dung mi tool and andahgroun gatekeep deliberately. This isn’t a failure of accessibility. No, it’s a strategy of resistance.
The form is breathless, percussive, built like dub. No uplift. No redemption arc. Just the lived experience of migrant labour, alienation, economic grind. Syntax fractures and verbs collapse: “mi did strang like a mule, but, bwoy, mi did fool.” It’s not sloppiness, it’s vernacular precision. Rhythmically, it hits like baton strikes. Repetition becomes the poem’s cudgel: “Inglan is a bitch” lands again and again with the weight of lived indictment.
There’s no metaphor here. England isn’t an idea, it’s the abuser. The poem risks respectability, readability, inclusion. What it earns is truth. And in doing so, it becomes one of the most formally radical and politically urgent poems of the 20th century.
A meditation on queer vulnerability: flinching, fluid, fragmented, soaked in bodily routine.
McMillan opens with quiet anxiety: “I’m scared of bumping someone while they piss.” What unfolds is a deeply embodied meditation: on shame, desire, intimacy, and memory. The poem doesn’t stay tidy. It begins in tactile detail, bags swinging, cock limp, wet puddle, and then dissolves into something looser, almost meditative. There’s a tonal shift mid-way, moving from sex memory to yoga-instructor imperatives: “we are told to tell our bodies that they are beautiful.”
That shift is risky. It softens. It reaches toward transcendence, but at times veers into new-age vagueness. When the poem returns to specificity—the smell of morning sex, dust on bare walls, it regains its footing. McMillan’s power lies in his ability to write the erotic without euphemism. “Water moving through him” isn’t metaphor, it’s physical, tender, exact. Later, the line “I regret now being so passive” folds in complexity: agency, regret, and importantly, vulnerability.
The poem lives in that tension between: control and release; avoidance and exposure. When it trusts the grime, the smell, the breath, it sings. When it drifts into poeticisms about bending beyond bones, it wobbles. But it dares to write bodies truthfully, and in doing so, it makes room for others to do the same.
Ambition is a beast, a bird that eats you alive, set loose in a domestic cage.
Sexton’s speaker doesn’t confess, she spirals. The Ambition Bird is insomnia at 3:15 a.m., cocoa cooling beside sacred delusion. It’s a poem about wanting more: recognition, meaning, more than a woman was supposed to ask for in mid-century American letters. And it makes no apology for that hunger.
The tone is at once sardonic, devotional, desperate. The titular bird wants to “pierce the hornet’s nest / and come out with a long godhead.” The language refuses neat metaphor. It’s theological, psychosexual, pathological. Structure-wise, the poem breathes in stutters, short lines, broken thoughts, enjambment that mimics compulsion. There’s no catharsis. Just accumulation. Just naming.
Sexton risks ridicule here. She names ambition not as a virtue but as an affliction. A sickness that scratches at the windows of a life shaped by domestic monotony and poetic desperation. And yet, the craft is precise. The illusion of chaos is carefully built. The final line, “There is folly enough inside this one”—isn’t closure. It’s an inventory. A warning. A mirror.
Transgressive writing isn’t a gimmick. It’s a decision. To stop polishing, and start naming. To stop performing, and start remembering. To stop waiting for permission, and write the thing that makes your shoulders clench.
This isn’t about being shocking. It’s about being free. I’ll always argue that if your writing still feels like it could sit comfortably in a tidy workshop circle, you haven’t gone far enough.
So go further.
Prompt Series: Writing Through Transgression and Shame
Preface: Why This Exercise Matters
This poem need not be explicit. But it is about sex, so it might be.
There’s nothing radical about writing on this subject. It’s been done, overdone, twisted and romanticised and dissected in every form imaginable. But here’s the thing:
Have you done it before?
Not scribbled a vague metaphor about sweat and satin. Not hinted at something in stanza four. But really written the truth of it, your version, in your voice, with intent and purpose?
If you haven’t, this is your liberation draft. If you have — but you’ve never shared it, or you let it rot in a notes app, or you left it half-edited because it made you flinch — this is your chance to go back in. Not to censor it. To sharpen it.
The point is not sex. The point is freedom. The point is claiming your body, your memory, your voice, not as material, but as origin.
Prompt One: Just Say It (Freewrite the First Time)
Instruction:
Write the story of your first consensual sexual experience. Don’t poeticise. Don’t soften. Don’t justify. Don’t perform. Just say what happened.
Tell the truth, not the headline version. Not the one you might admit at a pub. Not the sexy one. The real one.
Guidelines:
Tone Check:
If you feel like your mother would be horrified reading this, good. That’s your signal you’re getting closer to the real thing.
Reminder:
Nobody ever has to read this. But you do have to write it.
Prompt Two: Put the Body Back In
Instruction:
Go back to your draft. Now re-read it. Find where your body went missing, and put it back in.
This doesn’t mean make it sexy. This means make it real.
Ask yourself:
Be specific. Not “he tasted like wine.” Say: “he tasted like cheap wine and sandwich crust.” Say what actually happened.
Avoid stock phrases. No melting. No fireworks. No trembling. Instead, say: “I had one sock on.” Say: “the room stank of old deodorant.”
Your job: make the reader wince with recognition, or squirm with intrusion.
Prompt Three: Cut the Explainers, Find the Poem
Instruction:
Now take that messy, sensory draft and carve the poem out of it.
Step 1: Ruthless Edit
Cut every line that tries to:
Step 2: Break it Up
Introduce line breaks. Let breath decide where the lines fall. Let enjambment echo awkwardness, interruption, desire, or shame.
Step 3: Ask These Questions:
Final Instruction:
Go further than you think is polite. If it makes the reader uncomfortable, good. They’re supposed to feel like they’ve walked in on something they weren’t meant to see.
That’s where this poem lives: right at the edge of what you’re not supposed to admit.
Write it anyway.
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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.
