by Oz Hardwick
Welcome essay:
Tutivillus is a demon from medieval popular belief who takes down all the words you shouldn’t have said and uses them against you later, and I often conceptualise the guilt that comes with mental ill-heath as this unforgiving grotesque lurking is the shadows. It stands to reason that his counterpart should be an angel, but although I’m sometimes granted visions of light and blue blue eternity, I feel that for the past few months I’ve been shut away with nothing but Tutivillus for company. All of which sounds decidedly metaphysical, and on other days it’s just the lead weights sewn beneath my patchwork skin.
Poet biography:
Oz Hardwick is a European prose poet, whose work has been published and performed internationally in and on diverse media. His chapbook Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and has been followed by The Lithium Codex (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2019) and Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020). www.ozhardwick.co.uk
Old Water Rat Publishing 