William Bonar was a gifted and well-loved poet who co-founded St Mungo’s Mirrorball. Within a couple of days of William sadly passing away in September 2021, Sheila Wakefield, Founder/Editor at Red Squirrel Press, who had published him twice, and Jim Carruth, co founder of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, discussed a plan to launch a poetry pamphlet prize in his memory and agreed that it would include mentoring. 

 

Julie Laing is from Glasgow. She won the William Bonar Prize in 2023 and the Wigtown Poetry Prize in 2022. She was mentored through St Mungo’s Mirrorball’s Clydebuilt 13 scheme and has been published in New Writing Scotland, Gutter and elsewhere. She co-founded an off page visual poetry development programme with CD Boyland. 

 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari regarded their 1980 book, A Thousand Plateaus, as a work of ‘systematic, environmental and spatial philosophy’. Their central motif is that of a rhizome, which occurs in the natural world as an underground stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Society, they say, develops from structures, or plateaus, without points or positions, that can be ‘connected to anything other’. 

 

‘Laing’s poetry interrogates the very core of poetic understanding. Rare among her peers, she finds environmental, social, and aesthetic breakdown as the point where we ought to begin rebuilding for a better future. Indeed, musical and visual all the same, the edge of rhizome accounts for our error so we may build that better future.’

 

 

—Taylor Strickland

 

 

‘Julie Laing’s the edge of rhizome is a bold, modern masterpiece. Her words, echoing the rhizome, interconnect, spread their roots, ever evolving, ever-reaching, ever-interrogating the Anthropocene and our place in our ever- changing world.’

 

—Lorna Callery-Sithole

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