Issue One - Section X - Pop Vision / Leavecore ft Sam Riviere, Rishi Dastidar, Andy Jackson and Sophie Hall

Section X of The Aftershock Review is where the issue tilts sideways even more.

After so much grief, damage, survival, illness and reckoning, POP VISION / LEAVECORE opens a stranger room: one full of broken biscuits, Tupperware, cultural static, online exhaustion, singing, scapegoats and the odd bright absurdity of being alive now.

When I wrote in the opening editorial that trauma speaks many languages, this was one of the languages I meant. Sometimes aftershocks arrive through pop culture, jokes, and internet debris.

It’s also a definite act: I didn’t want only “pure” trauma in the work. I wanted the trauma of struggling with Tupperware, like in Sophie Hall’s poem, too.

Andy Jackson, Sophie Hall, Sam Riviere and Rishi Dastidar each find a way to make the contemporary world feel unstable, funny, brutal and oddly tender. These poems understand that survival does not always look noble. Sometimes it looks like noticing the ridiculous thing at the edge of collapse.

This is one of the sections I love most because it reminds me that poetry can hold trauma without becoming trapped by it.

After trauma, there is still poetry. And sometimes, thank God, it is weird.

Max Wallis, June 2026 xxx

You can buy Issue One here: https://www.aftershockreview.com/product-page/issue-1-the-aftershock-review